After negotiations in early July with the German government, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany announced on July 12 that survivors of the death trains, pogroms and ghettos in Iasi, Romania, will now be eligible to receive compensation. Claims conference special negotiator Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat said, “The horrors inflicted on the Jews of Iasi have finally been recognized more than 70 years later. These survivors endured unimaginable suffering. For those who are still with us, we have obtained a small measure of justice, even after all this time.”
Over the course of the negotiations the German government also agreed to several revisions in claim compensation programs. The revisions included an increase in the budget for in-home services for 2018 from $399 million dollars to $492 million dollars. Additionally, the time required to have been in hiding or using a false identity and be supplied with a claims conference pension has been decreased from six to four months. This revision will enable over 1,000 survivors to be supplied with a pension that they otherwise would not have been given. Another change is that eligibility for the Hardship Fund will be open to anyone who received one payment in the past that is less than the current amount being paid. This change will benefit at least 5,000 survivors.
These negotiations, which were run by Ambassador Eizenstat and a team made up mostly of Holocaust survivors, took about a year to come to fruition. The ambassador emphasized how great this is for the survivors and how rarely such reparations are drafted. He explained that he has been doing these negotiations since 2009 and “was quite pessimistic about having a breakthrough because they [Germany] had taken a very hard line about the implementation of some of the agreements we reached on home care because it was so close to the elections and because in previous conversations leading up to this we did not get any sense that there was much flexibility and in fact we thought up to the very time that we got on the plane that they were going to cancel the meetings.”
The ambassador explained the reasons he believed that the team had such a “stunningly good result.” He said that they had the first meeting in decades with the finance minister, and a number of people called him, including Jack Lou, the former secretary of the treasury. He explained the case that was made to the finance minister that pushed the historic revisions to be passed. The case that the claims conference made was that it was necessary to fill in all the gaps in terms of caring for those who had not previously received payments. Eizenstat said that the team had emphasized that when the number of survivors is miniscule a decade from now, the German government would want to look back and see that it had done everything that was possible in terms of reparations. He explained that it was necessary to “look at this as the last phase and that the last phase is one in which we cover everyone who has not been covered before.”
When asked what the goals for the claims conference were for the future, as the number of survivors is dwindling, the ambassador explained that this had come up as well during the process of negotiations. He said that the Germans were shown a chart of the projected number of survivors over the next 10 years, which is rapidly decreasing. However, explained Eizenstat, the funding necessary for the survivors would only increase over the next decade as the ages of the survivors increases and greater funds for health care become necessary. Another goal of the conference for the coming years is to have Germany increase funding for Holocaust education worldwide. Eizenstat explained that Germany itself has great educational programming about the Holocaust in place but that the goal of the claims conference would be to ensure that this same education is received worldwide.
By Mairav Linzer
Mairav Linzer is a student at Stern College for Women and a Jewish Link summer intern.
