Still fighting for survivors, Claims Conference sees new battle over Holocaust memory

Adapting Holocaust education for the post-October 7 generation is at the top of the agenda as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany looks to the future, according to Gideon Taylor, who heads the organization better known as the Claims Conference.

The conference, which was founded in 1951 to negotiate compensation and restitution for Holocaust survivors, also continues to face challenges securing payments for victims of the Holocaust from individual countries and organizations, particularly in Belgium, he said.

Taylor, who also heads the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO), said the Claims Conference distributed $1.5 billion in the past year to 220,000 Holocaust survivors, with half in Israel and half in 40 countries around the world.

Beyond helping support the rapidly shrinking number of living survivors, the conference also distributed funds for projects aimed at Holocaust education, research and awareness. As time passes and the Holocaust becomes a more distant past, education is becoming increasingly challenging, Taylor told The Times of Israel.

“We are now facing a perfect storm of challenges,” Taylor said. “On the one hand, there are fewer Holocaust survivors alive to share their stories, which has been a staple of education. There’s also an increasing lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, especially among younger generations, as we get farther away from it in history.”

According to a survey published by the conference ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, large swaths of the United States and seven European countries do not know that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. In France, half of young adults don’t know what the Holocaust is, the survey found.

Taylor noted that antisemitism wasn’t just on the rise, but able to take advantage of sophisticated tools to expand its sinister reach.

“The internet provides a megaphone for every lie or fringe conspiracy theory out there. And AI is making it easier to create deepfake images that can ‘prove’ any piece of misinformation. These are huge challenges that the conference is discussing today.”

Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault on Israel, which sparked the war in Gaza, attacks on Jews around the world have surged. But Israel’s opponents are also attacking the very memory of the Holocaust by trying to draw parallels between Israel’s military actions and the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jewish people, Taylor said.

“For many years, our focus was on Holocaust denial, when people try to say the Holocaust never happened,” he said. “Now, more recently, there has been a shift to what we call Holocaust distortion or even inversion. This refers to people saying that what Israel is doing now in Gaza is like what the Nazis did, distorting the memory of what happened for young people who don’t really know the history anymore.”

Recognizing this is a specific challenge for the future, Taylor said.

“We need to identify Holocaust inversion, invest resources to address it educationally and call it out in political settings,” Taylor said. He noted that President Isaac Herzog specifically mentioned Holocaust inversion when he addressed the United Nations on International Holocaust Memorial Day.

Among the results of the January survey were that one in four could not name a single concentration camp.

“For my generation, the name Auschwitz was a common symbol of evil, the worst of man’s inhumanity to man,” Taylor said. “If people don’t recognize something so symbolic, that means there’s no common language with which to talk, and the truth of what happened gets lost.”

On the bright side, the survey found that almost 90 percent of respondents across all countries believe there should be more Holocaust education.

“We see a lack of awareness, but we are also seeing a high degree of interest in Holocaust education,” Taylor said. “That presents us with an opportunity.”

To combat these trends, the Claims Conference has invested in new educational projects targeted at the next generation, including funding Holocaust-themed films, working with social media influencers, developing virtual reality experiences and exploring the use of AI to extract information from historical documents, Taylor noted.

The funding for those projects largely comes from Germany and other European governments or institutions that bear guilt for the Holocaust.

Complicated compensation

The Claims Conference still holds negotiations with Germany every year over the financial needs of Holocaust survivors and funding for Holocaust education. More than $1.5 billion comes from Germany annually, much of which goes to help survivors who are struggling to make ends meet, Taylor said.

The concept of receiving reparations from Germany was extremely controversial in the early years of the State of Israel. Many survivors and political figures, including right-wing leader Menachem Begin, fiercely opposed the idea, viewing it as “blood money” that represented a form of moral absolution for Nazi atrocities. However, other leaders like prime minister David Ben-Gurion argued that the funds were essential for the young state’s survival and for supporting Holocaust survivors. Ultimately, the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement created a framework for ongoing German reparations.

The organization, which has been called “the richest Jewish foundation in the world” in the past, has been criticized for paying astronomical salaries to its officers, including Taylor, and for not delivering enough of the money it receives to the survivors to whom it is allocated.

In 2023, Executive Vice President Gregory Schneider took home nearly $1 million in pay and other benefits, and at least four others made over $400,000, according to US tax filings.

After employees were indicted in 2010 for fraud and embezzlement of what was eventually calculated as $57 million, Taylor said all payments are now closely tracked to ensure that no fraud takes place. The money is sent by Germany and other countries directly to the Claims Conference, which is charged with distributing the funds to recipients.

“We have a complicated system where individuals receive compensation depending on their historical circumstances, along with assistance for home care and food for those who need it,” Taylor said. Compensation packages tend to be just enough to help survivors cover basic living costs, he noted.

Last summer, Germany agreed to make a one-time payment of about $238 to living survivors in Israel as a message of solidarity during Israel’s war with Gaza. More recently, the Claims Conference announced a venture in February with Israel’s Social Welfare Ministry in which it will fund 50 social workers to help survivors register for services and access critical systems and benefits.

At the same time, the WJRO works to secure additional compensation packages from other countries, and increasingly, specific companies that cooperated in deporting Jews.

“People ask, ‘How are there still restitution issues after all these years,’” Taylor noted. “While international treaties have been in place for years, several new documents were released in the 1990s that led to additional agreements. The issues we deal with now are mainly in former communist countries in Eastern Europe, like Hungary, Poland, Romania and Croatia, along with some in Western Europe that were never addressed.”

Last month, a panel commissioned by Belgium’s government concluded that the Belgian National Railway Company did not have to compensate survivors despite acknowledging that it carried more than 25,000 Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The committee said the railway company should offer an official apology to survivors, but stopped short of recommending reparations, saying the trains were the country’s “collective responsibility.”

Taylor criticized the decision saying that the argument meant no single entity could be held responsible. “For the sake of history, it’s important to know what happened at the railways,” he said. “If we want lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, it means facing up to that responsibility.”

Taylor said he planned to reopen the case with Belgium’s new government, sworn in last month. A previous agreement reached with the Dutch National Railway in 2019 secured up to €15,000 ($16,340) each for survivors from the Netherlands and their families, while a similar agreement with French state rail company SNCF secured more than $100,000 each for those deported to concentration camps on its trains.

The restitution of art and other property looted during the Holocaust remains a particularly sticky challenge, due to difficulties in proving ownership of an object.

To address these issues, the Claims Conference is working on digitizing records and promoting international guidelines for best practices in handling potential looted art cases.

“We’re not just talking about valuable paintings,” Taylor emphasized. “There could be a family heirloom, a library, or a ritual object that was looted that now appears in a museum or private collection somewhere.”

The ultimate goal of restitution is an acknowledgment of responsibility, Taylor said.

“People always ask, ‘How much do you want?’ and the answer is always, ‘It’s not about the money, it’s about the principle,’” Taylor said.

He noted that the German term for reparations — wiedergutmachung — means “to make whole.

“We never use this term because we believe that the immeasurable suffering endured by Shoah victims can never be ‘made whole,’” said Taylor. “Financial compensation is just part of recognizing what has been done.”