Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Long wait for restitution for Eastern Europe's Jews

From an article in The Australian by Jay Bushinsky, Jerusalem, May 30, 2005.

THE former "captive nations" of Eastern Europe re-emerged as independent states more than a decade ago, but the Jewish communal property left behind by their citizens who perished in the Nazi Holocaust remains beyond the reach of the victims' authorised representatives to retrieve.

It was confiscated by Hitler's SS immediately after the German Wehrmacht's conquests and was nationalised by the local communists after the Red Army's takeover. Since 1992, when the recovery process began, the former synagogues, hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries and ritual baths have been the subject of snail's pace negotiations and impenetrable bureaucracies.

...the private property left behind in these countries by the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims is valued in the billions of dollars.

. . .Poland, which had Eastern Europe's largest Jewish population – more than 3 million – has been responding to the WJRO's entreaties, but the restitution process has been agonisingly slow. At the current rate, it will take at least 60 years for the Jewish communal claims to be processed.

...the response of the 10 other former Soviet satellites also has been bureaucratic and legalistic. In short, they, like Poland, have been "stalling"...

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