February 2010 was a time of high tension for top officials at the Jewish organization that processes restitution claims for Holocaust survivors. Just three months earlier, they had discovered the existence of what would turn out to be a massive, multimillion-dollar fraud taking place at the agency, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany….
The German government agreed to significantly expand its funding of home care for infirm Holocaust survivors and relax eligibility criteria for restitution programs to include Jews who spent time in so-called open ghettos. The agreement, reached after negotiations in Israel with the Claims Conference, will result in approximately $1 billion in funding for home care…
Julius Berman, the chairman of the Claims Conference board, insisted he is not to blame for botching an investigation into a 2001 letter exposing massive fraud at the Holocaust restitution organization. “Somebody dropped the ball. That’s this issue,” Berman, 77, said in a new interview. “My conscience is totally clean on the role I played.”…
In November 2010, when the Manhattan U.S. attorney announced the arrest of 17 Brooklyn residents on charges that they bilked the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany out of many millions of dollars, he minced no words. This was “perverse and pervasive fraud,” said prosecutor Preet Bharara. The leadership of what is known as…
Contrary to his earlier claims, one of American Jewry’s most prominent leaders was warned about a serious Holocaust compensation scam more than eight years before the fraud became public. Julius Berman, who is chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, then directed his own inquiry into the fraud allegations but failed to…
Amid calls that the Claims Conference bungled a warning in 2001 about fraud within the organization, conference leaders appointed a committee to “formulate an appropriate course of action.” The move, announced by board chairman Julius Berman in an email to board members on Sunday, followed an announcement by the World Jewish Congress that it was…
The Jewish organization that processes restitution claims for Holocaust survivors is blaming an official who has since died for its failure to act on a 2001 warning about a multi-million scam run by some of its own staff. A spokeswoman for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany blamed the failure on Frankfurt-based Karl…
Top officials at the Jewish organization that processes Holocaust restitution claims were alerted to a fraud scheme being perpetrated by the group’s own employees nearly a decade before they moved to end it. The fraud scheme, which went on for 15 years and diverted $57 million to unqualified recipients, was first described in a detailed…
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