The World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) yesterday transmitted to the Swiss government a list of 40,000 Holocaust survivors who are candidates to receive aid from the Swiss fund to aid victims of Nazi persecution. All the names are of survivors living in Eastern Europe. The fund is planned for $180 million.
The list was given to the Swiss ambassador to the US, Alfred Defago, by Israel Singer, the secretary general of the World Jewish Congress. The step was designed to circumvent Rolf Bloch, president of the Swiss Jewish community, who heads the fund. The Jewish organizations have sharply criticized Bloch, who they accuse of delaying distribution of the aid.
The list contains the names of Holocaust survivors from Hungary, Poland and Romania and was assembled primarily from databases managed by the Joint, which has been assisting these survivors for years. The WJRO decided two weeks ago to give these survivors priority, as they received no reparations in the past and are living under difficult economic ocnditions.
Jewish Agency Treasurer Hanan Ben-Yehuda today asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to raise during his upcoming visit to Austria the issue of property looted from that country’s Jews. Following previous conversations between the two, Ben-Yehuda gave Netanyahu a memorandum prepared for the Jewish Agency summarizing the primary "Globes" findings concerning the affair of Jewish property in that country. The memo states that Vienna has evaded fulfilling its obligation to compensate heirs for forty years, despite complete documentation of the looted property. The findings also indicated that, in the early 1950s, Austria stole about 180,000 Jewish books that were left without heirs.