San Diego (special) -- Rabbi Andrew Baker, European affairs director for the American Jewish Committee, came to San Diego with good news about the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, but went back to Washington DC with bad news.

The good news was that the c, all these many years after the Holocaust, has agreed that victims of the nazi persecution who are still living in former communist countries in Eastern Europe are entitled to the same kind of compensation that Survivors living in the West had received from Germany years ago.

Baker, who serves as one of two AJC representatives on the board of the Claims Conference, shared the news on Jan. 22 with members of San Diego's New Life Club--an organization of Holocaust Survivors. But the meeting, held at the home of Mike & Gussie Zaks, reportedly was so tense that although Gussie laid her table with cookies and fruit, she later rued "nobody ate a thing."

Instead, members of the New Life Club poured out their frustration on Baker about the way the Claims Conference has been handling money it long ago received from Germany and has since invested. Some of the club's members became so emotionally wrought they expressed themselves as if the Reform rabbi were personally responsible, instead of being just one member of a large board representing the panoply of Jewish organizations.  Meeting the next day with HERITAGE, Baker said he had heard in other parts of the country some of the same complaints expressed to him by the Survivors here, and said he has raised some of the issues himself at board meetings. He said he planned to follow up their complaints with the Claims Commission.  Accompanied by Gary Rotto, AJC's regional director, Baker outlined in an interview the Eastern European settlement agreed to by the Germans as well as his responses to some of the local Survivors' concerns.

AJC COLLEAGES--Rabbi Andrew Baker,  right, European affairs director for the  American Jewish Committee,  was  guided around San Diego last month by Gary Rotto, AJC regional director

Before the negotiations with the Claims Conference, the German government had paid reparations money to various foundations set up in Eastern European countries, which in turn distributed the money to Jews and Gentiles alike, using the broadest definition to decide who was a victim of the Holocaust, Baker said. 

Under this arrangement most Eastern European Holocaust victims were paid no more than $600 -- a figure the German government at first thought sufficient. Then it was disclosed that nazi war veterans living in the same countries were receiving pensions, and "to add insult to injury," these pensions were named the "War Victims Pensions."

Baker said an advertisement that ran in the New York Times and the international edition of the Herald Tribune dramatized the issue: "It had a photo of a Holocaust s    urvivor in the Ukraine and a Waffen SS veteran from Latvia, and above it, it said, 'Guess which one receives the war victim's pension from the German government.'"

President Clinton raised the issue of the Holocaust victims with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during a meeting last year, and then 82 senators signed a letter urging Kohl to address the issue of the pensions for the real victims. Last August, the German government agreed to open negotiations with the Claims Conference.

After negotiations that stretched from October through December, the German government announced this month that it had created a $120 million fund (200 million marks) to pay between 18,0000 and 20,000 "severe victims" of the Holocaust monthly pensions of approximately $135 (250 marks)."

While not much by U.S. standards, Baker said for the elderly Holocaust Survivors living on very small incomes in Eastern Europe, the money will be of considerable assistance.

A "severe victim" was defined as a person who had spent six months or more in a concentration camp, Baker said. Thus far, the Germans have refused to budge on the issue of compensation to an estimated 1,000 1,500 elderly persons who spent less than six months in concentration camps. In the main, these were the people who were the last to be rounded up by the nazis, and who were liberated at the end of the war. Many of them are Hungarian Jews.s

"I don't know how you can say to someone, 'well, if you were only five months in Auschwitz, you shouldn't be entitled to something,'" Baker said. "So clearly there are people left outside and there will be continuing efforts to liberalize and bring them in." 

* * *

Besides helping to channel money to individual victims of the Holocaust, the Claims Conference serves as steward for payments made by the German government in compensation for property confiscated by the nazis from Jewish families, who then were murdered, leaving no heirs.

"They have had millions since 1948 and they are not spending it on the Survivors," Gussie Zaks charged in an interview with HERITAGE. Instead, she said, the money goes to "any organization that they like;" some with only the most remote connection to the Holocaust. She said money has found its way to yeshivas and other non-profit organizations with which board members have special relationships

"The German government won't talk to nobody but them (the claims conference)," Zaks said. "Just take the interest from those millions over 50 years--imagine how much money they have. It's just not fair. Survivors are leaving us, you know. We have tomorrow a funeral. Every week somebody dies. What are they waiting for? For when we are all gone? Why can't they help the people now?"

Zaks said although some money has been sent by the Claims Conference to Jewish Family Service in San Diego, it is but a fraction of what should be sent to help elderly Survivors. "Do you know how many people would love to come to a meeting but they don't drive anymore?" Zaks asked rhetorically. "They don't even drive in the day anymore, not only not at night. Now, we are going to get someone to bring them to our meetings every month."

If more money were made available for the Survivor community in San Diego, she said, "we would do what Los Angeles is doing, have once or twice a week, a place where we could bring the Survivors who don't drive, who don't go anywhere, who don't leave the house, and bring them over, have some music, let them sit and sing together. This is what they have in Los Angeles; this I would like to see here."

Besides by the Zakses, the contentious meeting with Baker was attended by Rose Schindler, the newly installed president of the New Life Club; Gita Flaster; Hadassah & Beno Hirschbein; Betty & Isadore Horne; Hannah & Henry Marx; Eva Neuman; Pearl Recht; Phil Schlossberg and Mitzi Wilner.

* * *

Baker said property which cannot be returned to its rightful owner, because no heirs can be located, is sold by the Claims Conference "an the moneys are transferred to its allocation fund. This fund allocates 85 percent or so of the money to projects that will benefit Survivors and 15 percent to projects that will support an archival work on the Holocaust," he said.

"There is probably not a Jewish social service or family service agency in any major city of the United States which has not among its clients Holocaust Survivors and which has not applied for and received funds under this fund," Baker said. 

"It has provided millions of dollars to create old age centers in various cities of the former Soviet Union; St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, where services are provided to Holocaust survivors."

He said when money for a project is appropriated over three years, the full amount is set aside, and so what appears like unencumbered funds shows up on the balance sheet. "The Claims Conference has done a very poor job of explaining what has been going on," Baker said.

"It has been the style of the Claims Conference leadership, which is small and has been around a long time--and maybe because most of their focus was on trying to negotiate agreements with Germany--to work quietly and even secretly," Baker said. "SO I think when people don't know what is going on, they suspect all sorts of things."

While defending how the Claims Conference spends money, Baker said he was sympathetic--in fact supportive--of another complaint that he heard in the meeting with the New Life Club: that staff members of the Claims Conference at times seem unresponsive even callous to concerns expressed by Survivors.

"What I have heard from people here I have also heard from others: that they have had a lot of bureaucratic difficulties, and that there is not the sensitivity in dealing with Survivors that many would like to see from the Claims Conference...

"Because of some of the concerns and criticisms the Claims Conference is now creating an ombudsman's office, which will be independent of it, which will be able to address some of the decisions that people find unfair," Baker said.

"I am no doubt sure that many of these people performing bureaucratic functions may find the work bureaucratically demanding and also don't give the proper care and sensitivity to the people they are dealing with," the rabbi said. 

"I am sure that exists in other places, and I know it existed in previous compensation programs when people had to deal directly with the German government or its representatives. 

"What has become so troubling for the Survivors here is that this is a Jewish organization and one is far less forgiving and understandably so."