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PRAGUE (JTA) — The Czech Jewish community has applauded the German government's recent decision to give direct compensation to victims of Nazism in Central and Eastern Europe.

About 9,000 Czech citizens, including 2,000 Jews, could receive money from the approximately $47 million fund now being prepared by the German government.

"Survivors have been waiting over 50 years for this," Tomas Kraus, general director of the Federation of Jewish Communities, said in an interview with the Prague Post.

The $47 million fund is "meant for victims of the Nazi regime who suffered extraordinarily and haven't received any compensation yet," Thomas Bagger, the German press attache here, told the Prague Post.

"It will be designed to catch those people who have fallen through the cracks until now."

Payment will be decided on a case-by-case basis and will be made during a three-year period, said Bagger.

Fund will help bring many to Papon trial

PARIS (JTA) — The civil plaintiffs in the case against former Vichy official Maurice Papon are setting up a fund to help pay the cost of bringing hundreds of people to the southwest city of Bordeaux for the trial.

The plaintiffs and their lawyers also plan to set up a headquarters near the court that will be equipped with telephones, fax machines, archives and interpreters for the 150 civil plaintiffs and witnesses, and for the 150 reporters and 30 lawyers who are expected to attend the trial.

The group estimates its costs at some $175,000.

The campaign to collect funds will begin in mid-March, will appeal to the Jewish community and appear in the media.

The trial, expected to take place in the fall, will give the French people an exhaustive examination of the Vichy government.

Legal proceedings against Papon, first undertaken in 1981, were delayed by successive French governments in the hope that Papon would die before a trial took place.

Papon, 86, is charged with crimes against humanity for ordering the deportation of 1,560 Jews, 223 of them children, to Nazi death camps when he was secretary general of the Bordeaux region's local government during Germany's wartime occupation of France.

His prominence in French public life after the war as Paris police chief in the 1960s and as budget minister in the 1970s has made it an exceptionally high-profile case.