World Jewish Congress

(WJC)

   The organization was founded in 1932 for the purpose of defending Jews against Nazism and antiSemitism. Together with its affiliate, the American Jewish Congress, the organization in 1933 labored to mobilize public opinion in support of a boycott of German goods as a punishment for the Nazi’s brutal treatment of the Jews in Germany. The subsequent one-day boycott of Jewish business concerns in Nazi Germany on 1 April 1933 was the government’s retaliation against the activities of the WJC and other Jewish organizations. Under the leadership of Stephen S. Wise and Nahum Goldmann, the WJC lobbied the United States government to alleviate the deteriorating situation of European Jewry. When the WJC representative in Switzerland, Gerhart Riegner, cabled Wise regarding the German implementation of the Final Solution, the organization, after a delay of a few months, staged mass rallies and in general took the lead in urging the Roosevelt administration to take more forceful action on behalf of European Jewry. Once the Riegner cable was verified by the Allied governments, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under pressure from his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., established the War Refugee Board.

   With the election of Edgar Bronfman as president of the WJC in 1981, the organization continued to monitor issues that affected the world’s Jewish community. In the mid-1990s, the World Jewish Congress accused Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, of concealing his wartime record as a German intelligence officer in the Balkans, where he was involved in the deportation of Jews and Yugoslav partisans to concentration camps. When Waldheim was denied entry to the United States under the Holtzman Amendment of the Immigration and Naturalization Acts, he accused the World Jewish Congress of organizing a conspiracy against him.

   Under Bronfman’s leadership, the World Jewish Congress accused Swiss banks of profiting from the Holocaust. The WJC called for an accounting of the whereabouts of millions of dollars that was entrusted to Swiss banks by terrified Jews seeking to escape Nazi persecution. The WJC confrontation against the Swiss banks was joined by U.S. Senator Alphonse D’Amato, who convened hearings in Congress to investigate the failure of the financial institutions to honor the claims made by survivors and relatives of the victims. President William Clinton endorsed the work of the WJC and appointed Stuart Eizenstadt, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and the government’s special envoy for property restitution in Central and Eastern Europe, to conduct an interagency investigation of the archival evidence against Switzerland.

   Although a consortium of Swiss banks in 1998 offered close to $600 million for a “rough justice fund” for survivors of the Holocaust, the WJC dismissed the offer as insulting and insisted the restitution be calculated in today’s values. The WJC calculated the sum owed the survivors and relatives of Holocaust victims to be approximately $1.5 billion. The Swiss banks as well as the president of Switzerland, Flavio Cotti, rejected the position of the WJC, and by the end of July 1998, negotiations had collapsed.

   The threat made by New York, New Jersey, and California to impose sanctions against Swiss banks on 1 September 1998, however, may have been a major factor in the subsequent agreement reached in mid-August 1998, between the Swiss banks and Jewish groups led by the WJC. Accordingly, an estimated $1.25 billion agreement on compensation for unreturned Holocaust-era assets was reached by both parties. The agreement stipulated that the money would be paid out to Holocaust survivors over a three-year period.