Joanna __________________
http://www. haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=148986&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemNo=148986
How Israel obstructs Holocaust victims' rights
By Yair Sheleg
In 1997, at the height of negotiations with the Swiss banks over compensation for dormant bank accounts belonging to Holocaust victims, the Swiss - in a gesture of goodwill - established a humanitarian fund of $180 million to be distributed among needy Holocaust survivors.
All the Jewish communities in the world hurried to form agencies to distribute the money as quickly as possible. After all, the potential beneficiaries were both needy and elderly. Only the Israel dragged its feet
(despite the fact that it was supposed to distribute one-third of the money - $59 million - among its citizens).
First, and although the money was expressly designated for needy Holocaust victims, finance ministry officials demanded that most of the money go to the treasury - on the argument that the state was "the heir of the Holocaust victims."
When this proposal was rejected, Bobby Brown, at the time in charge of governmental handling of the issue of Jewish Holocaust property and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's advisor on Diaspora affairs, asked that at least the distribution of the money be handled by the government rather than by voluntary Jewish organizations.
This, it was argued, would benefit the survivors, under the assumption that government distribution would enable supervision and control by means of the High Court of Justice and the State Comptroller. In fact, the result was negative in the extreme. The question arose as to which government agency should be in charge of distributing the money.
About 14 months were wasted on examining the possibility that the National Insurance Institute (NII) do the job, until the heads of the NII made it clear that it did not have the manpower to do so. Ultimately, after a three-year delay, the money was distributed by the Bureau for the Rehabilitation of Disabled Victims of Nazi Persecution with the Postal Authority actually distributing the money.
Israel was the last country in the world to distribute this money.
Legislation opposed
The story of the Swiss humanitarian fund proves that even in recent years, despite the intense awareness of the harsh circumstances of some Holocaust survivors, we are still seeing failures and errors that demonstrate a lack of sensitivity. Sometimes, the feeling on the part of official Israeli agencies is that the interests of the survivors run counter to thecounty's interests.
Raul Teitelbaum, a former journalist and member of the board of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel (an umbrella organization), who is currently writing a book on Holocaust reparations, relates that even in the late 1980s, when a delegation of "Mengele twins" left for Germany to conduct negotiations on reparations, the Israeli embassy was asked "not to interfere or help" the delegation.
The reason for this: Treasury officials feared any help provided to the survivors would come at the expense of aid the State of Israel hoped to receive from Germany. When the negotiations with the Swiss banks began, the Israeli government acted in the same spirit.
Then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin gave his blessing and power of attorney to the World Jewish Congress to conduct the negotiations on behalf of the survivors and their heirs living in Israel, so long as Israel itself would not have to be involved and complicate its political interests with Switzerland. Only during the Netanyahu government did the approach change to some extent, when his Diaspora affairs advisor Brown became apartner to the Jewish negotiating team in the various reparations affairs (banks and insurance companies).
When Ehud Barak was elected prime minister, the country's involvement was stepped up further. For the first time, the government had a minister of Diaspora affairs, Michael Melchior, who was involved in the negotiations and who sent direct representatives on his behalf. (Melchior is still involved as deputy foreign minister.)
Nonetheless, the only agreement a representative of the State of Israel officially signed was the agreement on the establishment of the German fund for forced laborers. This was because the Germans wanted the agreement to be signed not only with representatives of the organizations, but especially by the representatives of the countries where the former forced laborers now live.
This was to guarantee the countries' commitment not to allow private claims by citizens in the matter of forced labor after the signing of the agreement. Situations involving direct damage to survivors' rights has also continued in recent years. Once again, as in the past, this was principally for "budget" reasons.
The finance ministry, for example, tried two years ago to subtract from their pensions the amounts Holocaust survivors - eligible for income supplement payments - received in the form of reparations.
Claims by the survivors, backed by the expert opinion of former justice minister Haim Zadok, that these payments should not be viewed as income because they were compensation for damages, just as indemnity payments from insurance companies for stolen cars are not viewed as income, were to no avail. Ultimately, only an administrative regulation handed down by the then labor and social affairs minister Eli Yishai prevented the NII from carrying out its plan to subtract the payments from the pensions.
Avraham Hirschson MK drafted a bill to prevent any kind of payment subtraction of this kind, but the Knesset has yet to approve it. According to Hirschson's legal advisor, Micha Hendelsman, this is because of opposition from the treasury.
Victims' heirs
The problematic nature of the state's approach to reparations for Holocaust victims was similar to its approach on the matter of property belonging to such victims. However, unlike the Swiss banks and the European insurance companies - which tended to deny the fact that they were holding property belonging to people that had perished in the Holocaust - in Israel, claimants did not generally encounter sweeping denials of this kind.
Nonetheless, there were many problems. In order to contend with these problems a parliamentary commission of inquiry was formed two years ago, headed by Colette Avital MK (Labor), to locate and restore these assets to their rightful owners. Avital enumerates a number of the principal difficulties that her committee uncovered in its work, which is not yet complete:
The amount of money paid to those who had bank accounts or other assets that claimed their property was minuscule and ludicrous. A year ago, a case involving a client of Bank Leumi came to light. She had deposited 200 pounds (sterling) in 1948, after the Holocaust, of which she used 40 pounds (leaving 160). When she came to claim the money 40 years
later, she was told that "according to the rules of interest that were in force in the bank inthose years," she would receive only 13.10 shekels. Accordingly, says Avital, "one of the goals of the commission is "to determine a revaluation mechanism to calculate the real value of the accounts and assets today."
When the commission sought to conduct an external examination of the banks in order to independently uncover assets belonging to Holocaust survivors, Avital encountered opposition from the banks in the name of banking secrecy - exactly the same claim made by the Swiss banks. Only threats to force the exposure of the accounts by legislation caused the heads of the banks to give in and agree to the examination, which began onlya few months ago.
To carry out the examination, the commission depends on the agreement of the banks and organizations being examined for funding. The banks are so far the only ones to agree to fund the examination. Various real estate firms, which apparently are holding on to victims' assets, and even a governmental agency like the Custodian General, have refused to fund the examination, and this is holding up the implementation of the decision.
At least one-tenth of the property the Custodian General manages belongs to Holocaust victims or their heirs, but his offices have not bothered for many years to conduct any activity of their own to locate the owners of the assets. Only in the wake of pressure from the commission did the justice minister instruct the Custodian General to establish aunit in his bureau to deal with active location of assets' owners. The commission went further and is now acting to amend the Custodian Law so as to require the Custodian to actively locate the owners of assets rather than merely to manage them.
No compensation was provided for land the owners of which remain unknown (including Holocaust victims), which was appropriated for many years by the Authority for Public Needs. The bureau of the Custodian General, which manages this land, should have made sure that compensation was provided to potential heirs, but did not do so.
The criteria for the release of property from the Custodian General were too strict, even after claimants arrived to claim it. Fearing that the claimants might be imposters or that there might be additional heirs, the Custodian General's bureau tended to set very strict guidelines for the "release" of property. These restrictions often simply wore down the claimants, who preferred to concede the property they had coming to them. Only recentlydid the justice ministry form a special team whose job it is to examine ways to ease the criteria.
Finally, the question remains open as to who should receive and deal with all the property that will remain without heirs. It appears that there are a number of senior Israeli officials - one is the current Justice Minister, Meir Sheetrit - who are convinced that all this property should be transferred to the State of Israel as the "heir of the victims" rather than to the Jewish organizations or even Holocaust victims' organizations (unless the government itself decides to give it to them).
In the past 18 months, the legislation of the Holocaust Survivors' Law has been on theagenda. The law will not provide survivors with additional rights (with the exception of the establishment of a special assistance fund), but will rather establish in law and coordinate the rights they already have and grant them a symbolic "Holocaust survivor" medallion. Despite this, the law has not succeeded in getting passed.
The members of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, who set the law in motion, are divided as to how the law should be formulated. The organization's legal advisor, Ze'ev Sher, who formulated the proposal, included in it the definition of a Holocaust survivor as "one who spent at least six months under Nazi rule." This definition infuriates Teitelbaum, who asked, "Why have we struggled all these years against the German determination of a minimum time period for the receipt of reparations, when now we would accept this principle with our own hands? In the Holocaust, one day living under the Nazis was enough for one's life to be in danger. Besides, what about those who managed to escape in time from the Nazis but lost all their property - shouldn't they too be considered Holocaust survivors?"
Teitelbaum thinks legislation of the law is being delayed because of its symbolic and nonpragmatic nature, "And that is why no one is in any rush to pass it." But there may also be something symbolic in the fact that 57 years after the Holocaust, 54 years after the establishment of the State of Israel, when the generation of Holocaust survivors will soon no longer be alive, the Knesset has not yet found an opportunity to pass a law - albeit symbolic - to define their status and rights.
Tehran children
A group of 198 Holocaust survivors belongs to a group known as "Tehran children" - who at the time of the Holocaust escaped from Eastern Europe via Russia to Iran, and arrived in Palestine during the war. They submitted a large claim against the state three months ago. They argue that the state prevented them from receiving money they had coming to them in the context of the reparations agreement.
The claim is based on the fact that in the reparations agreement, the state committed itself to preventing the survivors that arrived in Israel until October 1953 from submitting personal claims against Germany for damage to their health. At the same time, the state received the sum of 3.45 billion marks (about $833 million in the value of the time) in the reparations agreement.
The money was designated for the "resettlement and rehabilitation of the survivors of the Nazi slaughter" but was in fact used for general purposes of building the state, with the survivors only indirectly benefiting from it. The calculation according to which the amount of the reparations agreement was set took into account about a half a million Holocaust survivors that immigrated to Israel in that period, with the "absorption cost" of each estimated at about $3,000, for a total of about $1.5 billion.
From this sum, the Germans subtracted about a third, claiming that that amount was the responsibility of East Germany, and additional sums to offset the value of German property in Israel (especially the assets of the Knights of Templar). According to this calculation, say the Holocaust survivors in their claim, at least half of the sum mentioned - $1,500 per capita - should have been given to them personally.
Consequently, they are claiming it with interest and linkage, which in their view today is equivalent to NIS 100,000 per person. The claimants also request that their claim be viewed as a class action, making the verdict applicable to all relevant Holocaust survivors. Because there are a few tens of thousands of survivors that immigrated before 1953 living in Israel, the total sum of the claim could go as high as quite a few billion shekels.
However, with all the problems in the State of Israel's treatment of the holocaust survivors, it appears that the current claim is based on a disregard of the basic factsinvolved. The State of Israel passed the Disabled Victims of Nazi Persecution Law, which stipulated personal reparations for each individual who could not submit a direct claim toGermany in the wake of the agreement. Following this law, the state has paid out over $3 billion (in today's terms), or four times what it received in the reparations agreement. This is the reason why even the members of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust. Survivors in Israel are in no rush to express their solidarity with the new claim.
Noah Flug, the director-general of the organization only said, "If I thought the claim was realistic, our organization would have made the claim long ago, although everyone of course has the prerogative to have his case reviewed in court." Raul Teitelbaum's response much harsher. In his view, "This is a spurious and completely unfounded claim. It is part of the current fashion, with people seeking to profit from the hundreds of millions that have been in the air in recent years. After all, the calculation of $3,000 per capita, which was at the foundation of the reparations agreement - and it too was too low - was not designated to be handed over personally to the survivors, but rather as a collective compensation for the state in order to take in the survivors.
Despite this, the state has provided individual compensation to survivors, at a sum that is higher than the total it received in the agreement." Attorney Gad Weisfeld, representing the survivors' claim, responded: "The Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors is connected to the establishment, which is why I would not relate to its people as an authority on the subject."
Concerning the matter at hand, Weisfeld says that the survivors' claim is justified because the state representatives made numerous compromises in the context of the reparations agreement, both concerning survivors that immigrated to Israel before October 1953 as well those who immigrated after that date. "These are compromises that the state had noright to make on behalf of the survivors, and they undermined the survivors' ability to realize their claims, if they had submitted individual claims against Germany."