Schneider dances around it, but the picture is clear enough: the Claims Conference intends to continue allocating millions each year to something other than survivor welfare, even in the face of a growing crisis among the aging & ailing survivor population in the U.S., Israel, Europe and everywhere. The Claims Conference has, by Schneider’s own admission, sheltered these funds from being diverted to humanitarian purposes, which must be a great relief to the grant recipients involved in “education, documentation and research.” The sad fact is that needy survivors would benefit enormously by an annual infusion of $18 million over current funding. Each dollar means an extra ounce of comfort and security for these people.
Jewish social welfare agencies know precisely what that money can do. In the face of the economic downturn, they struggle to do more with less, are desperate for funding, and have almost nowhere else to turn but the Claims Conference. Funding from some future agreement with Lithuania is just a concept that does nothing to address the current emergency. In Israel, the government has been pressured to step up direct aid to survivors, but Israel is unique. Everyone else depends on the Claims Conference. And yet the shameful policy of allocating an important chunk of resources to non-welfare purposes continues. The small minority of survivors who sit on the Conference’s Board have long opposed this policy, but they are perennially outvoted by the non-survivor majority – an insular hodge-podge of establishment organizations that have long ago settled into a mutual back-scratching society.
JTA’s Uriel Heilman asked the question the vast majority of survivors and their descendants demand to know: “With the survivors in their final years, doesn’t it make sense to put the education portion on hold and give all of the money to survivors’ welfare needs?”
Schneider’s ascendancy to the top professional post of this mega-Jewish institution (the largest Jewish non-profit entity in the world, controlling over $1.2 billion in assets in 2007, larger than the Jewish Agency, the JDC, or any of the large-city North American federations) has been accompanied by a PR initiative but no sign of substantive change. The “momentum” he describes coming out of the Prague Conference – or the part of it that might benefit survivors in some tangible way – is already rapidly evaporating. The Claims Conference in the meantime has held its "Annual Meeting" -- which produced no announced changes in allocation policy -- indeed, no public announcements at all other than Schneider's promotion. Status quo seems the operating order of the day.
As we wait for Europe to “step up,” it’s time for the Claims Conference leadership to wake up and reallocate its own funds to face the humanitarian crisis overwhelming our aging Holocaust survivors.
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