BERLIN — Scattered across the world, speaking a myriad of languages, hundreds of thousands of people share two attributes: They are Holocaust survivors and they have been helped by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
This year, the founders and directors of the Claims Conference — created after World War II to oversee restitution and reparations to survivors — marked the organization’s 50th anniversary by reflecting on its task, its accomplishments and its future challenges.
It has not been an easy 50 years. In addition to carrying on complex international negotiations, the Claims Conference recently has had to contend with accusations from survivors.
Holocaust survivors and their advocates say property and assets looted by the Nazis did not in fact belong to “the Jewish people as a whole,” but to European Jewish communities and individuals. Furthermore, they say, only the survivors are entitled to determine spending priorities, not the groups that negotiated on their behalf.
Some are particularly incensed that monies from the Claims Conference are going to help needy Jews in the former Soviet Union who are not Holocaust survivors. According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, as much as 25 percent, or $25 million, of the Claims Conference’s distributions last year went for this purpose.
Despite the turbulence, Karl Brozik, who represents the Claims Conference in Germany, said the emotional rewards of the conference’s work have been great.
Brozik, 75, recently visited a Jewish senior home in Prague that the Claims Conference supports. There he met a handicapped woman who had been homebound but, since moving to the center, is able to “take part in life.”
“She said she is so happy that she can sit in the garden of the home in her wheelchair,” said Brozik, himself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and the Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps. “When you see something like that, you feel you have not been working in vain.”
Other Claims Conference officials also are keenly aware of the significance of the organization’s mission.
“This is not a job. It never was,” said Saul Kagan, 79, who served for 47 years as the Claims Conference’s top professional.
“The broad lesson of the Holocaust, which must outlive the survivors,” is that “responsibility does not die with the generation of the perpetrators,” said Kagan, who now serves as a special consultant to the organization.
“Would that there was never a need for the Claims Conference,” said Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the New York-based organization. “But what the organization has done in the past 50 years will be looked upon as a remarkable achievement for the Jewish people.”
The Claims Conference was founded in New York in 1951 by 23 Jewish organizations and representatives of the State of Israel.
Convened by Nahum Goldmann, then co-chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel and president of the World Jewish Congress, the conference had the mandate to negotiate with Germany for reparations for the material losses suffered by Holocaust victims.
The time was ripe: German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had declared to the Parliament on Yom Kippur 1951 that Germany had committed “unspeakable crimes” against the Jewish people and must make material compensation and restitution to survivors.
Largely as a result of efforts by the Claims Conference, more than 500,000 Holocaust survivors in 67 countries have received compensation payments valued in current terms at about $50 billion.