Legislation that would allow Holocaust survivors to file suit over insurance policies from that era was the subject of debate at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relation committee on Tuesday.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who chaired the hearing, noted that the occasion marked the first time a Senate committee has met to consider holocaust insurance issues specifically.
"While no amount of financial compensation or property restitution can ever make up for the indescribable wrong of the Holocaust, we all are committed to doing what we can to assist these survivors to obtain meaningful compensation due to them for the assets they lost during the war and around the period prior to the war, and to have that compensation come to them without delay," he said.
Many Holocaust era claims were resolved through the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, which Nelson noted "closed its doors" last year after paying out more than $300 million in claims to over 48,000 survivors. However, other survivors have been critical of the ICHEIC, and last year Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., and Robert Wexler, D-Fla., introduced H.R. 1746, which would allow survivors to bring their cases to federal court and require insurance companies in the U.S. who wrote policies in Europe in the years before and during World War II to disclose the names of all their policyholders at that time to the National Archives for publication.
Jack Rubin, a Holocaust survivor and member of the advisory committee for the Holocaust Survivors of West Palm Beach in Boynton Beach, Fla., testified in favor of the bill before the committee, noting that his own claim with ICHEIC was denied over a supposed lack of evidence. Rubin said his father had purchased insurance with Generali Moldavia through an agent who was also killed during the Holocaust, but that the insurer claimed to have no knowledge of either the policy or the agent when he filed his claim.
"This is absurd, because I know we had insurance," he said. "Don't you think Generali, which even then was a global giant, would have kept information about its insurance agents, and about its subsidiaries? That's what big insurance companies do."
Additionally, Rubin criticized the ICHEIC as being "controlled by the insurance companies" and operating behind closed doors, a criticism echoed by Samuel Dubbin, a partner with the law firm of Dubbin & Kravetz, LLP in Miami.
"It is money, yes, because the insurers profited outrageously from the Holocaust and turned their backs on those who trusted the companies' supposed integrity," Dubbin said in his testimony. "But this law is also about the truth. And the current system, the status quo represented by the ICHEIC legacy, has permitted the companies to hide behind the secrecy of an unregulated and extra-legal process, chartered in Switzerland and headquartered in London, and make decisions about Holocaust survivors' rights with no governmental or judicial oversight."
However, critics of the proposed legislation argued that it could undermine the efforts to resolve Holocaust era claims and ultimately make things more difficult for survivors seeking restitution.