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30 Shvat 5778 - February 15, 2018 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Justice for Persecuted Algerian Jews

By A. Rafael

For many years it has been argued that the members of the Jewish community in Algeria, persecuted by the Vichy government during the Holocaust, never received due recognition and proper acknowledgement for the great suffering they were subjected to. The focus was always, very naturally so, on the mass decimation carried on against European Jewry, while the Algerian community was shunted to the sidelines.

Now, however, after many years of testimonies, collection of data, documentation and claims, the Claims Conference has decided, after comprehensive negotiations with Germany, that Jews of Algerian extraction who suffered German persecution during WWII, shall also receive reparations.

The Claims Conference, the American Jewish body responsible for negotiation with the German government regarding reparations, has undertaken the project of locating the relatives of Jews who lived in Algeria, and transfer to them reparation funds in the coming summer.

The compensation is minimal compared to other sums allocated by the German government to European Holocaust victims; nevertheless, it represents a historic recognition of German war crimes perpetrated on Algerian Jewry. The sum will be 2,550 Euro, or some 11,000 shekel. It will be allocated to Jews who lived in Algeria during the period between July 1940 and November 1942, almost two years, during which the Jewish community suffered at the hands of the French Vichy government which collaborated with the Nazis.

According to the data of the Claims Conference, in the world today, there are some 25,000 Jews of Algerian descent answering to this criterion, the majority of which are today living in France, with 3,500 of them living in Israel.

"The recognition of this large group of Algerian Jews who suffered from anti-Semitic treatment by Nazi allies, should have taken place long ago," says George Schneider, CEO of the Claims Conference. Now, after the decision has been implemented, those eligible people living in Israel will receive a notification to their homes from the Claims Committee, including assistance in filling out the necessary applications which will be presented either in Paris, Marseilles, Boulogne and Toulouse, where central data offices of the Claims Conference will be established, to deal with the victims.

Algerian Jews suffered during the Holocaust years from various forms of restriction. Thus, for example, they were prevented from attending schools, were dismissed from work places and were denied French citizenship.

"The French in Algeria never accepted the fact that the Jewish population deserved equal rights like the French citizens," notes Professor Chaim Saadon, deacon of academic studies in the Open University and director of the Center of Documentation for North African Jewry during the Second World War in the Ben Zvi Institute.

 

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