This is part of an article written by Netty C. Gross for The Jerusalem Report of July 21, 2008.
Seventy-four-year-old Maya Gershgorin from Haifa survived World War II and the Holocaust by escaping with her mother and sister to the Ural Mountains, deep inside the Soviet Union, before the Germans conquered her native Ukraine in 1941. She immigrated to Israel in 1990.
Gershgorin was one of the plaintiffs in the 6-year Tel Aviv District Court case known as Mariana Rodshtein and 1,914 others v. the Claims Conference, in which she and others with similar narratives claimed that the Conference had withheld Holocaust reparations from them illegally. In early June, the Court found in favor of 1,365 of the plaintiffs and ordered the Conference to pay up, to the tune of 10,000 shekels ($3,000) each, plus interest.
Gershgorin described to The Jerusalem Report how the Conference blocked the elderly immigrants from receiving payments from the German government’s Hardship Fund, set up in 1980 to compensate Eastern European Jews who fled the advancing Nazis to the Soviet Union during the war. According to Fund criteria, Gershgorin says, needy immigrants under the age of 60 had to prove 80 percent health disability to qualify for the DM 5,000 (which equals 2,600 euro or $4,380 as of late June) payment. Most of the plaintiffs failed to meet the criteria and were turned down.
Yet Gershgorin (whose application in the early 1990s just before her 60th birthday was rejected because she could not prove 80 percent disability) says that at the time, neither she nor others were worried because the health clause was waived for those older than 60, and they thought they would simply reapply when they reached that age.
But they then discovered that individuals could only apply once to the Hardship Fund. Had the Conference warned immigrants to simply apply after turning 60 when the health disability was no longer relevant, “most would have done so,” Gershgorin contends. “Why would a Jewish organization, whose job it is to pay German claims, do this to us?” she asks.
The same question troubled Knesset Member Marina Solodkin, who says that she implored Conference functionaries not to fight and just admit that “a mistake had been made.” But nothing budged them, she says. So she helped organize the appeal to the District Court.
Judge Oded Mudrick accepted the Conference’s argument that the statute of limitations had run out on the claims of the 550 plaintiffs who had joined the lawsuit seven or more years after their applications for Hardship Fund monies were rejected. But he ruled in favor of the 1,365 others and ordered the Conference to pay out 13,650,000 shekels plus interest, an award, which plaintiff attorney Yoram Sheftel estimates will tally up to 20,000,000 shekels (about $6 million). Sheftel called the rejection of the applications of 550 plaintiffs “scandalous” and pressed Conference lawyers to publicly commit to not appeal Mudrick’s ruling, and to also compensate the 550 rejected plaintiffs.
In an e-mail to The Jerusalem Report, New York-based Claims Conference spokeswoman Hillary Kessler-Godin said the German government had set the rigid Hardship Fund criteria and that the Conference was “bound to follow its direction in implementation of the program.”