los angeles | After nearly 60 years of petitions and a decade of litigation, many survivors and their descendants seeking to collect on Holocaust-era life insurance policies have had their hopes dashed.
At least one attorney vowed to file an appeal after a New York federal judge last week threw out the cases against Assicurazoni Generali, one of Europe’s largest insurers.
In their lawsuits against Generali, plaintiffs in California, New York, Florida and Wisconsin charged that the Italian company had stonewalled their claims for decades or fobbed them off with meager settlement offers. Over the years, 20 class-action and individual suits against Generali had been combined and assigned to U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey.
In his Oct. 14 decision, Mukasey dismissed all of the cases, ruling that the president and executive branch of government — rather than state or federal courts — had jurisdiction over Holocaust-era claims against foreign companies or governments.
In earlier preliminary rulings, Mukasey had appeared to favor the survivors’ cases, but the legal playing field tilted last year when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a pro-survivor California law as unconstitutional meddling by a state in foreign affairs.
The U.S. government, Generali and other European insurers have maintained all along that all claims should be submitted and resolved through the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims.
However, the commission has been under persistent fire from survivors and their lawyers, who have charged it — in the media and lawsuits — with foot-dragging and serving as a front for the insurance companies.
Mukasey himself, in an earlier statement, described the commission as a “company store” for the insurance companies.
The judge’s ruling was met with considerable bitterness. Ebi Gabor, a plaintiff who had not heard of the court decision, described the legal blow as “very, very painful.” The 77-year-old Holocaust survivor from Hungary said, “We have waited for 60 years for the insurance payments due us, and every year we have filled out more papers. This is a big shock.”