CLEVELAND — The story of two brothers, one in Israel and one in Cleveland, fighting over Holocaust reparations is no longer so easy to judge.
The brother who is accused of stealing the other’s identity in order obtain reparations asserts that his brother knew about it all along.
David Feig of Rishon Lezion, Israel, recently filed suit in U.S. District Court against Sam Feig of Beachwood, Ohio. The suit accuses Sam Feig of wrongfully obtaining money from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Sam Feig has declined to speak to the media. But his attorney’s newly filed motion to dismiss the claim and answering brief shed some light on this brother’s side of the story.
According to Sam Feig’s brief, David Feig was aware — long before receiving a claims conference denial for compensation in July 1996 — that his brother was collecting German reparations under his identity.
“Plaintiff (David Feig) was well aware that defendant Sam Feig was using his name and identity to claim reparations from the German government. In fact, the two brothers negotiated extensively over this issue,” according to the brief.
The brief says that in 1955, David Feig wrote a letter to his brother in Cleveland saying that he was aware Sam Feig was collecting reparations under his name. In the same letter, David Feig gave his brother the number tattooed on his arm while in Auschwitz, “further enabling Defendant to continue making claims.”
In 1989, at the urging of their now-deceased uncle, the two brothers began negotiating over the reparations payments with a mediator.
According to the brief, “The end result of these negotiations was a release signed by Plaintiff David Feig in the presence of Rabbi Moshe Pinkovitch, in which the Plaintiff stated that ‘I waive all monetary claim or claims of any kind upon my brother Schmuel (Sam) Feig.’ In exchange for this release, Defendant Sam Feig paid Plaintiff with a check dated May 16, 1989, for the equivalent of $20,000 U.S. dollars.”
Both the release, and the canceled check have been provided as exhibits to Judge Patricia Anne Gaughan.
Sam Feig has asked the judge to dismiss his brother’s claim. He has further asked the court to issue an injunction that would prevent David Feig from making any other claims on this issue.
“This is a long-ago settled dispute. Mr. [Sam] Feig’s reputation has been unfairly dragged through the mud,” Sam Feig’s attorney David Wolfe Leopold said.
In another motion filed with the court, Sam Feig asked Gaughan to levy sanctions against his brother and his brother’s attorney.
According to the motion for sanctions, the brother’s original mediator from a decade ago, Ben Zion Eliezer Ungar, recently visited David at his nursing home to speak to him about this case. “However, to Mr. Ungar’s surprise, Plaintiff was unresponsive to his attempts to initiate conversation. According to Mr. Ungar, Plaintiff was unable to communicate whatsoever,” says the motion.
Leopold believes David Feig’s attorney, Robert A. Goodman, has not done his homework and that the plaintiff and his attorney have “misused” the court to revive a “legally meritless issue.”