The decision of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims
Against Germany -- more commonly known as the "Claims
Conference" -- to reaffirm its restitution funds allocations
policy was hailed by Agudath Israel World Organization.
The Claims Conference will continue to allocate 80 percent of
funds from the sale of recovered but unclaimed East German
Jewish property to institutions like senior-citizen homes and
to other social services servicing Holocaust survivors. The
remaining 20 percent will go towards educational research,
documentation and education related to the Holocaust.
Agudath Israel World Organization endorses the significant
moral claim that Holocaust survivors themselves have on
restitution funds. In fact, many of Agudath Israel's
constituents are themselves survivors, and benefit from
Claims Conference-supported social programs.
At the same time, the 91-year-old international Orthodox
Jewish organization supported keeping at least the current
proportion of funds for efforts that are aimed at ensuring
that prewar Jewish Europe and its destruction is properly
remembered.
What is more, Agudath Israel maintains that a legitimate aim
of the Jewish community is to perpetuate communities and
Jewish educational institutions that characterized Jewish
Europe before the Nazis came to power. Such communities and
institutions are a proven portal to Jewish continuity.
These points appear in a detailed memorandum submitted by the
Agudath Israel World Organization to the Claims Conference as
the restitution body was formally reconsidering its policy of
devoting 20 percent of its funding to Holocaust research and
education. That reconsideration was prompted by calls from
organizations representing survivors for elimination or
severe reduction of the Claims Conference's educations-
related allocations.
Agudath Israel took the position that funding should continue
to be provided for research and education -- a position
ultimately endorsed by the Claims Conference's board of
directors. But the Aguda also made a case for allocating a
portion of the funds earmarked for research and education to
kehillos and yeshivos.
Central to Agudath Israel's case is the historical fact that
a substantial portion of those Jews who perished during the
Holocaust were Orthodox. Indeed, appended to the Agudath
Israel presentation is a letter from respected Holocaust
historian (and former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum) Dr. Michael Berenbaum, which concludes that 50-70
percent of Jewish victims of the Nazis lived and died as
traditionally-observant Orthodox Jews, having lived their too-
short lives in one of several thousand identifiable
kehillos. There were, moreover, as many as 800
yeshivos for boys and young men in prewar Europe, according
to a study undertaken by AIWO, and some 250 for young
women.
Today's Orthodox institutions of education and communal life,
Agudath Israel maintains, "are doing the most to ensure the
survival and continuity of the very way of life that those
victims, had they been given the opportunity, would have
sought to perpetuate." And they are, the memo documents as
well, among the most needy in contemporary Jewish life.
The Agudath Israel memo further contends that such
institutions -- which, to date, have not benefited from any
significant restitution-related funding -- have a unique
moral claim to restitution, inasmuch as "central to the
Nazis' aim of destroying the Jewish people was the object of
destroying Jewish learning and education." Among the evidence
presented are quotations like one from Alfred Rosenberg,
Hitler's chief ideologue, who in 1930 identified "the
honorless character of the Jew" as "embodied in the Talmud
and in Shulchan-Oruch."
The memo also quotes a 1940 directive from I. A. Eckhardt of
the German Highest Security Office prohibiting Jewish
emigration from occupied Poland on the ground that an influx
of Eastern European "Rabbiner," "Talmud-lehrer" and "Orthodox
ostjuden" could foster "spiritual renewal" among American
Jewry.
To a large degree, that concern proved well-founded. Orthodox
immigrants, although arriving mainly after war's end, in fact
helped rejuvenate Jewish life in America, rebuilding their
communal and educational institutions and fostering
traditional Jewish observance.
The import of that fact is what Agudath Israel urged the
Claims Conference to consider -- and intends to continue to
press in the months and years ahead.
"Now that the Claims Conference has reaffirmed its commitment
to the general principle of providing significant funding for
education," says Professor Moishe Zvi Reicher, Agudath Israel
World Organization's director of international affairs and
United Nations representative, and author of its
presentation, "the time has come to expand the concept to
include Jewish education in its most basic, and timeless,
sense.
"When we think of Hitler's victims, we understandably think
of the six million of our relatives whom he murdered. But a
truly astute observer realizes that Jewish communities and
the Jewish heritage -- a Jewish way of life and learning,
along with the structures that undergirded them -- were
victims too.
"And what is more, the kehillos and yeshivos of the
contemporary world are not only their heirs, but keys to a
bright and vibrant Jewish future."
