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By the numbers, victims and survivors short-changed

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Message: If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/15969/full/15969/by-the-numbers-victims-and-survivors-short-changed/ By the numbers, victims and survivors short-changed Friday, July 13, 2001 | by Joseph Aaron This is a column about numbers. But you don't need to have any mathematical skills to understand it. Just a Jewish soul. You know when you run across something and you're not sure whether to laugh or cry? Well, I've been reading about some numbers that add up to the mother of all such somethings. The more I think about them, the more I try to figure them out, the more I don't know whether to laugh or cry about them. No. 1 on the list is the news that an Israeli parliamentary committee has approved payment of $750 each to the families of the victims in a suicide bombing attack at a Tel Aviv disco that killed 21 Israelis, most of them young, most of them from the former Soviet Union. I must admit this one stopped me in my tracks. $750? Now, of course, one could make a very good argument that the notion of putting any monetary value on any human life is obscene, beyond the moral pale. And there is much to that argument. But we must also live in the real world, be aware of practical realities. Which is why David Ben-Gurion was so right in accepting reparations from Germany, though almost all Israelis and all of world Jewry opposed it at the time. Though the notion of putting a price tag on the loss of 6 million Jews is unfathomable, what Ben-Gurion understood is that reparations honored the memory of the 6 million by giving the young, struggling state of Israel the necessary funds to provide it with a strong foundation. And, indeed, the $6 billion Germany paid to Israel basically built the infrastructure of Israel. And so it was the right thing to do, even if it didn't really feel right. So with these 21 young Israelis murdered in a suicide bombing as they waited to enjoy themselves at a disco. But $750? If it is hard to accept the notion of any figure being put on the loss of any human being, especially of a Jew by the Jewish state, it is to choke on the notion of coming up with the figure of $750. Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Especially when you hear about this next news item. Namely that a Palestinian who killed eight Israelis when he drove a bus into a group of a people at a bus stop near Tel Aviv is going to receive a $4,200 tax refund from the Jewish state for work he performed for the Egged bus company. Oh, by the way, he used an Egged bus in the attack. $4,200? The state of Israel is going to pay a man who ran his bus into a crowd of Jews, killing eight Israelis in the process, $4,200? Going to give him a tax refund? How the hell did that come about? What bureaucratic rule yielded that? Does having our own state mean we are like any other state, the captive of bureaucracy and inane regulations? That we become so focused on the letter of some statute somewhere that we lose hold of our Jewish souls, our Jewish sense, our Jewish morality? How, virtually at the same time, could it be decided to pay $750 for each of 21 Jewish souls lost in that Tel Aviv disco bombing while deciding to give a Palestinian murderer of eight Jewish souls a tax refund almost six times that amount? The moral issue matters, the amounts matter. Taken separately, they say much. Taken together, they speak volumes. Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry. And then there is the little matter of the big money Germany is to pay to Nazi-persecuted slave laborers. After more than seven years of negotiating, it seems an agreement has finally been reached that will see survivors receive payment from a fund set up by the German government and German businesses. About 160,000 Jewish survivors are eligible for compensation. But if you look at the numbers, when all is said and done and negotiated, it seems being a lawyer calls for more compensation than being a victim of the Nazis. Look at the numbers. Slave laborers, those marked for death through work, will receive about $4,400. Total. Forced laborers, everyone else forced to work, will receive about $2,200. Total. Meanwhile, Burt Neuborne, a lawyer who worked on the case, will receive $4.4 million in fees. That's about $3,000 for every day he worked on the case, compared with $4,400 total for years of being a Nazi slave laborer. When asked about it, Neuborne said the fee being paid to him is "not particularly high." He must have been thinking about Melvyn Weiss, another lawyer, who is getting $6.3 million for his efforts. Other lawyers are getting other millions. Indeed, all together, the lawyers in this effort are walking away with tens of millions in fees. Call me overly sensitive, but this somehow doesn't feel right to me. Feels like after seven years, we've totally lost sight of the whole point of this whole effort, which was twofold. One was to have those who committed the Holocaust be brought to moral account, acknowledge their guilt and do so in a heartfelt, tangible, concrete and clear way. The other was to provide for those who suffered so much, especially those who now live in poverty. Money was not the point, although it is a way to demonstrate atonement for sins committed and it does provide aid for many survivors who have little of it. But justice and the survivors seem to have become secondary in a case that became about too much money with too many negotiations and too many German companies looking to avoid litigation and too many lawyers walking away with too much of the total. And yes, I know those lawyers worked very hard and long and did much to make this happen and no, I am not just bashing lawyers. What began as and should have always been a moral crusade has ended up as high-stakes financial wrangling and a legal windfall. Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Especially considering this interesting little tidbit relating to those payments to Nazi slave laborers: It seems that German banks will make millions of dollars as a result of exchange rates from the transfer of funds to pay those Holocaust-era slave laborers. That's right, banks in Germany will actually make money in paying out their piddly sums to Holocaust victims. And so it turns out that Germany atoning for its sins is good business for its banks. I guess it never dawned on anyone that maybe the German banks should agree to put back any funds made on the mechanics of the transfer back into the compensation fund. A Jew blown up by terrorism gets $750, while a terrorist who killed Jews gets $4,200. A laborer forced into slavery by the Nazis gets $4,400, while a lawyer who slaves away on the case gets $6 million. Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry. But at least now I know why I never liked math in school.

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