The prime minister, who introduced the legislation, admitted the close to $40 million was a ‘symbolic’ sum.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Lithuania’s prime minister has introduced a bill to the country’s parliament that would set aside €37 million to pay restitution for the first time ever to individual Holocaust survivors and their heirs.

“I believe this is an issue that Lithuania finally needs to resolve,” Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė  told reporters when she submitted the proposed law to the Seimas.

Legislation passed in 2011 established a “Good Will Foundation” to pay a similar amount, €36 million, over the course of 10 years, for real estate confiscated from Jewish communities during the Nazi and Soviet periods. According to the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), which is a partner in the foundation, this amount was what the government determined was 30% of the value of 152 Jewish synagogues, cemeteries and related properties.

Besides being used to support Jewish communal life in Lithuania, it helped restore several Jewish heritage sites, said the WJRO, and provided a “modest” one-time grant in 2014 of approximately $1.1 million that was split among more than 1,550 needy Lithuanian Holocaust survivors around the world.

But most individual Jews who fled the country during or immediately after World War II, or their heirs, have never been compensated in any way for their private property. There had been a real-estate restitution law, but only for Lithuanian citizens. When that law was declared unconstitutional years after the application period expired, the process was never reopened for resubmission of claims.

According to Šimonytė, one part of the new law will provide a way for “symbolic financial compensation” in the form of “a flat amount per claim” to be paid to those who could not apply for restitution in the past but are now found to be eligible.

Survivors or their heirs have until December 31, 2023, to submit their documentation, with compensation being paid out over a seven-year period beginning in 2024.

While not mentioning the actual proportions, she said that “the greater part” of the €37 million would again be allocated to Lithuania’s tiny Jewish community, which currently stands at 5,000 members.

The reason for this, she noted, was that “a very large part of the property…would be classified as so-called ownerless property, for the sole reason that not only the majority, but the absolute majority of the Jews who lived here perished in the Holocaust in Lithuania.”

Since it “is objectively impossible to determine those heirs,“ she stated, this portion of the money would go to the community.

A full 90% of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

While acknowledging, as the prime minister did, that the compensation was symbolic, the WJRO hailed the proposed legislation.

The law is “an important step to providing a measure of justice to Lithuanian Holocaust survivors and their families for the horrors they suffered during World War II and its aftermath,” the group said in a statement.

The part that will go to the community through the Good Will Foundation, the statement continued, “will have a significant impact on strengthening and supporting Jewish communal life in Lithuania and addressing the welfare needs of the elderly, even though it may only be a fraction of the value of prewar Jewish property.”

The proposed law stands in sharp contrast to legislation that had been proposed in committee by a member of the former ruling party. In 2020, lawmaker Arunas Gumuliauskas requested a declaration ensconced in law absolving the state of all responsibility for the well-documented collaboration of so many of its citizens with the Nazi repression and murder of their Jewish neighbors.

The statement read in part, “The Lithuanian state did not participate in the Holocaust because it was occupied, just as the Lithuanian nation could not participate in the Holocaust because it was enslaved.”

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Polish law aimed at compensating people whose property was seized under Communism excludes Holocaust survivors and their heirs.

Jewish organizations from around the world voiced disappointment over a proposed Polish law aimed at compensating people whose property was seized under communism, saying it excludes most Polish Holocaust survivors and their heirs.

Poland’s Justice Ministry last week published the bill, which requires that claimants be Polish citizens and limits compensation to spouses, children or grandchildren.

The World Jewish Restitution Organization says those provisions would exclude the vast majority of Holocaust survivors and their families because most left Poland during or after World War II and settled elsewhere. The group also says because of the Holocaust’s toll, the heirs of seized properties are often nieces or nephews rather than direct descendants.

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) has also expressed “profound disappointment” that Holocaust survivors are being excluded from the law.

Gideon Taylor, the WJRO’s chair of operations, said Wednesday he still hopes the legislation can be amended to include Polish Holocaust survivors.

“It is not just about getting compensation, it’s about a link to the place,” he said. “For many descendants, it is a connection to generations of life in a far-away place that was part of their family fabric but was ripped away from them.”

The problem dates to a communist-era decree seizing large numbers of private properties in Polish cities. Most of the original owners were not Jewish, although significant amounts of property had been Jewish-owned, a reflection of the large Jewish presence in Poland before most of Poland’s Jews were murdered by Germany during the Holocaust.

Since the fall of communism across Eastern Europe, Poland is the only country that has so far not passed legislation regulating the process of restitution, with only some case-by-case returns of real estate ordered by the courts. The lack of a comprehensive legal framework has led to serious irregularities in the restitution process, including fraud, which has sparked outrage.

Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki, who is pushing for changes to the law, says that should end such “pathological situations.”

The bill must still be approved by lawmakers and the president.

By: AP

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More then seven decades after most of Serbia’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, the Serbian government is compensating the survivors for their lost property.  

A program to provide direct funds to Serbian Holocaust survivors all over the world has been launched in Serbia, an international Jewish group said Tuesday.

The program results from a law passed last year in Serbia allowing for the restitution to the Jewish community of heirless and unclaimed Jewish property seized during the Holocaust, the World Jewish Restitution Organization said in a statement.

Tens of thousands of Serbian Jews perished during Nazi occupation of the Balkan country during World War II.

The law envisions the Serbian government paying 950,000 euros ($1 million) per year for 25 years to the Federation of Jewish Communities. For at least the first 10 years, one-fifth of the money will be set aside for direct payments to Holocaust survivors, the World Jewish Restitution Organization said.

“This is a historic step to provide compassion and a measure of justice to Serbian Holocaust survivors more than 70 years after the Nazis declared Serbia free of Jews,” WJRO Chair of Operations Gideon Taylor said.

The first payments are just starting, and the organization has been reaching out to 1,000 survivors who now live in 27 countries around the world, including Serbia, Taylor told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

“It’s a powerful symbol, it is a symbol of recognition of history, it is recognition that many Jews perished in the Holocaust in Serbia and that there are survivors alive today who are acknowledged through this modest compensation payment,” Taylor said.

Taylor praised Serbia’s willingness to tackle the issue of heirless and unclaimed Jewish property, urging other countries to follow the example.

“The fact that Serbian survivors are living in so many countries is significant,” he added. “It emphasizes how global is this issue.”

WJRO’s statement said the survivors can apply by the end of July for the direct payments.

Only a few thousand Jews live in Serbia today.

By: AP

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Polish Holocaust survivors and their heirs have a final chance to reclaim property lost during the Shoah.

A Jewish organization has launched a database aimed at helping thousands of Holocaust survivors or their heirs to regain property lost in Warsaw, Poland, due to the Holocaust as well as to the Communist regime that followed.

Under a new Polish law, people will have just six months to file claims for more than 2,600 properties in Warsaw after they are listed publicly in a newspaper or online, something expected to happen soon.

Not all of the properties belonged to Jews, but it is believed that many did.

Claimants who fail to come forward by the deadline will relinquish their rights, with the city to assume permanent ownership of unclaimed properties.

“There is now a very limited opportunity for some kind of justice for people who suffered so much,” said Gideon Taylor, chair of operations for the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which created the database.

The new law, which entered into force in September, affects people who had property in Warsaw that they tried to reclaim after the war. At that time, the Communists seized much of the prewar property of Jews and non-Jews alike, making it impossible in practice for anyone to reclaim it. The Communist regime fell in 1989.

In the years since, some original owners have reclaimed lost property in complicated legal proceedings, but it has been more difficult for the Jews who fled Poland and settled abroad.

As the problem continues to fester, the city of Warsaw this year compiled a list of 2,613 street addresses that will be open to claims, but does not give the names of the original owners.

The new database matches the street addresses with the names found in historical records.

Taylor says it’s unclear how many properties had belonged to Jews, although he believes there must have been many. Warsaw was 30-percent Jewish before the war, and Jews were well-represented in the professional and property-owning classes.

Before the war, Poland was home to about 3.3 million Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe and the second-largest in the world after the United States. Most of them perished in the Holocaust.

Poland is the only European Union country that has so far failed to pass a national law that returns property to Holocaust survivors and to others dispossessed by the war or Communism.

By: AP

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