Justice Comes to Survivors in Long-Awaited Checks

Sonya Braverman had just turned 17 when Nazi armies sealed the ring around Leningrad in the fall of 1941, beginning a siege that lasted 900 days. Braverman was among 300,000 Jews in the metropolis of 3 million, of who some 1 million died under constant artillery fire, aerial bombardment and starvation until Russian troops broke through the encirclement in January 1944.

Her memories of death, hunger and suffering, alongside extraordinary ingenuity and bravery, stretch the limits of comprehension even some 65 years later, yet Braverman was one of the luckier ones.

Working as a secretary for the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, she was “privileged” to receive twice the normal daily ration of 4.4 ounces of black bread, sometimes supplemented by a “soup stew” made by boiling a leather belt mixed with grass.

Braverman left her hometown and came to Los Angeles with her son’s family in 1992. A couple of months ago, she received a long-delayed “compensation” for her wartime suffering in the form of a $3,500 check from the German government.

Sitting in her modest one-bedroom apartment in the Menorah senior housing complex on Fuller Avenue, whose front sign credits its origin to the Jewish Federation Council and the nearby Temple Israel of Hollywood, Braverman detailed how she’s spending her bounty.

“I pre-paid for my funeral, I paid up my dental bills, and I gave $100 in Chanukah gelt to each of my two grandsons,” Braverman, now 84, said through Russian-English translator Celia Kirilover.

The payments for Jewish survivors of the Leningrad siege, now living in the West, followed negotiations with the German government by the Claims Conference (formally, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany), which also administers the program.

Since its founding in 1951, the Claims Conference has concluded agreements for approximately $100 billion in compensation, with the lion’s share of the money coming from the German government, supplemented by small amounts from Swiss banks, European insurance companies and the Austrian government.

The bulk of the payouts go directly from Germany to Holocaust survivors and other victims of Nazi persecution, but millions of dollars in grants are channeled to social service agencies by the Claims Conference.

Surprisingly, in an era of cutbacks, $168 million for such agencies in Israel, the United States and 41 other countries has been budgeted for 2009, representing an increase of $18 million over the 2008 figure, said Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Claims Conference.

Some of the increase is for new programs, such as the one-time payment to Leningrad survivors. In addition, there is a recent initiative to compensate Jews who performed so-called “voluntary” or “at will” labor in Nazi-run ghettoes and, following numerous missile attacks from Gaza, a grant of $428,000 to assist Nazi victims exposed to new traumas in southern Israel.

Nevertheless, Taylor acknowledged that it seems “counterintuitive” to spend more money on survivors, when deaths are steadily diminishing their current numbers of about 250,000 in Israel, 115,000 in the former Soviet Union, 100,000 in the United States, and 125,000 in the rest of the world.

The explanation is that the natural attrition is counterbalanced by the increasing needs of the remaining survivors, most in their 80s and 90s, who require more, and more expensive, care as they get older, frailer and sicker.

Chief Operating Officer Greg Schneider of the Claims Conference estimated that needed expenditures for the worldwide survivor community will continue climbing, peaking in three to five years, and then gradually declining.

Another factor this year is the tanking economy, said Paula Fern, Holocaust Services director for Jewish Family Service (JFS) of Los Angeles.

“Last year at this time, we had a caseload of around 900 survivors; now it’s up to 1,500,” she said. “People who were independent until recently, now need community help.”

To help cover the additional expenses, the Claims Conference allotment to JFS is $1,805,808 for the current year, some $100,000 above last year’s figure.

Survivors do not live by medications and meals alone, and the most popular JFS offering is Café Europa, one at the Westside Jewish Community Center and the other at the Valley Storefront in North Hollywood.

Once a week, 30 to 70 survivors meet at each of the venues for live and lively music, some schmoozing and noshing, celebrations of Purim, Tu B’Shevat and other holidays, bingo, lectures and maybe a spot of dancing.

“It’s just wonderful,” said Dorothy Greenstein of North Hollywood, a child survivor and at 78 one of the group’s youngsters. “Once a week you get dressed, you put on makeup, you don’t just sit home.”

Sophie Hamburger of West Los Angeles, an Auschwitz survivor in her 80s, agreed. “Going to Café Europa just picks you up,” she said. “If I can’t go one week, I really miss it.”

In all, 10 agencies in Northern and Southern California received a total of $3,112,344 in Claims Conference grants this year, including Jewish Family Service of Orange County, Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Long Beach and two Los Angeles organizations.

One is Bikur Cholim of California – Jewish Healthcare Foundation, which received $60,000 and focuses on services in the Orthodox community.

“We are following in the footsteps of the community assistance organizations of pre-war Jewish life in Europe, with special emphasis on home care, medication, food and transportation for needy survivors,” said Rabbi Hershy Z. Ten, founder and president of Bikur Cholim.

The other agency is the Bet Tzedek public interest law center, which received $30,000 and is the one-shop stop for Nazi victims trying to navigate their way through the often labyrinthine channels and forms as they pursue their compensation claims for months, and often years.

Attorney Lisa Hoffman is part of a five-person team at Bet Tzedek that last year guided 1,500 survivors through the legal processes, from filling out applications, keeping up with changing rules and programs, and filing appeals when claims are rejected.

The legal team has enlisted attorneys from major law firms to participate in the work pro bono, and the arrangement has proved so successful that it has been extended to 30 cities in the United States and Canada.

When Braverman was first told by friends about the program for Leningrad survivors, she turned to Hoffman and her colleagues for help.

So did Hungarian-born Martin Kohn, who had survived six concentration and forced labor camps, including Auschwitz and Plaszow — made infamous by “Schindler’s List” — by the time he was liberated at age 16.

After arriving in Los Angeles in 1948, Kohn applied for restitution, but, he said, was ripped off by a private “expert.”

Five years ago, Kohn finally turned to Bet Tzedek, which helped him apply for compensation for his “voluntary” ghetto labor in Szatmar, the birthplace of the Satmar Chasidic movement.

Kohn also found himself eligible for other compensation programs, but turned down an initial offer from the Hungarian government to “compensate” him for the concentration camp death of his parents and six siblings, at the rate of $15 per person.

Of Kohn’s experiences with Bet Tzedek, his wife, Lola, enthused, “Without them we would have gotten nothing. They helped us fill out forms with some very tricky and confusing questions and they’re always courteous.”

Such ringing endorsements are rarely received by the Claims Conference, whose leadership, distribution of funds and alleged lack of transparency have come under frequent fire by survivor groups and Israeli officials, but Taylor insisted that the organization will carry on “as long as one Nazi victim is alive.”

Currently, his top priority is to recover former Jewish property in Poland, a country that has “no compensation program at all,” he said.

“We can never ‘compensate’ the survivors for what they suffered,” Taylor added, “but perhaps we can achieve a measure of symbolic justice.”