|
Jewish Holocaust Survivors Receive First Compensation Package
NEW YORK, June 19 (News Agencies) - The first in a series of checks to compensate workers indentured under the Nazi regime in Germany were sent Monday to some 10,000 Jewish survivors in 25 countries, the Jewish Claims Conference said Tuesday.
The New York-based group was sent the first batch of payments from Germany, and charged by the German foundation established by government and industry there to distribute the monies to the international Jewish community, with the exception of several countries.
Ten thousand survivors will receive disbursements of $4,400 within a week, said group president Israel Miller. They are the first among an estimated 160,000 living survivors of the Nazi camps eligible to receive compensation.
About 50,000 survivors live in the United States and Canada.
Survivors who labored in concentration camps will receive around $6,600; those who worked for German industry will receive roughly 2,200 dollars.
Additionally, non-Jewish survivors forced to work under the Nazi regime -- an estimated 700,000 to 1.5 million people, many of whom reside in Eastern Europe in countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Czech Republic -- are eligible to apply to receive similar compensation.
The German foundation, named "Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future," has collected 4.4 billion dollars from German business and industry to compensate victims of the Third Reich.
Seven groups including the JCC are distributing the money.
Last week, press reports said lawyers representing those who served as forced laborers under the Nazi regime will earn a total of 54.6 million dollars for bringing the compensation case against Germany to a close.
Under the scale established by two independent experts chosen by a New York judge overseeing the affair, the total represents less than 1.5 percent of the $4.4 billion total payment agreed to by the German government and industries.
Under the terms of the agreement, made public Thursday, 11 lawyers will earn over one million dollars, with the biggest paycheck going to New York attorney Melvyn Weiss (6.6 million).
Michael Hausfeld, a prominent Washington attorney, was awarded 5.3 million dollars while Burt Neuborne, a professor at the New York University Law School, was given 4.4 million.
German lawyer Michael Witti was awarded 3.6 million dollars.
The Holocaust victims will each receive compensation of between $5,000 and $7,500 in coming weeks.
Lawyer compensation has been a sore point since the beginning of the case, with victim representatives calling it shameful that the lawyers seem to be the greatest beneficiaries of the German largesse.
"It's a pity, but the only way to have the needy survivors paid was to agree to pay those high fees to lawyers, (money) which unfortunately otherwise could have been used for Holocaust survivors," said Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress.
Steinberg said many of the lawyers who worked free of charge to resolve a similar dispute involving repayments of money banked in Swiss accounts did so with the expectation of hefty fees from this, and other cases.
"The Swiss bank agreement, which many of them were pro bono for, was a loss leader, so they could make a lot more money on the other cases, including the German case," he claimed. "None of them were pro bono there."
In response, the attorneys argue that in similar class-action lawsuits, frequent in the United States, other attorneys earn around one third of any judgment awarded to the collective plaintiffs.
|
