By David Chesanow, JTNews Correspondent
On June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down California’s Holocaust Victim Insurance Relief Act as unconstitutional. Since then, Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler and other local advocates of Holocaust-era life insurance claimants expressed dismay at the ruling against the 1999 act.
The law required that European insurers disclose the names of all holders of policies from 1920–1945, or have their American subsidiaries in California face sanctions. Representatives of the insurance industry contend that HVIRA interferes with the President’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign policy, specifically executive agreements concluded with Germany, Austria and France. The court agreed.
In 1999, Washington State also passed a version of HVIRA almost identical to California’s.
“We are clearly disappointed at the Supreme Court’s decision, and deeply offended the U.S. Justice Department sided with the European insurers and against Americans seeking minimal justice,” Kreidler stated in a press release headed, “U.S. Supreme Court deals blow to Holocaust victims.”
He added: “Survivors and their heirs who are owed money are entitled to payment.”
The Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling reversed a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding the California law. As a result, Kreidler’s authority to compel insurers to disclose the names of Holocaust-era policyholders has been “preempted,” said Christina Beusch, the assistant state attorney general who advises the Office of the Insurance Commissioner on legal matters.
Remy Trupin, government affairs director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, a proponent of Washington’s HVIRA, said, “We’re looking at possible remedies, particularly at the federal level, that would take into account the needs of survivors and their families.” Trupin said these include bills being sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D–California) and Mark Foley (R–Florida).
The publicizing of policyholders’ names is considered to be essential to enabling the maximum number of potential beneficiaries to file claims. In the past, insurance companies have responded to inquiries with various reasons why claims could not be pursued, such as the absence of death certificates for Holocaust victims and changes of government in the nations where branches of the insurers were based.
Marvin Stern, manager of the Holocaust Survivors’ Assistance Office in Seattle, indicated the scope of the issue: “One company, [German insurer] Allianz, has acknowledged having 1.5 million policy records. Not all of those were Jews, but we don’t really know what the universe of potential claims is. That one company has handed over around 200,000 [policyholder names], but we have no way of knowing how many policies they actually have.”
Stern said that all the European insurers combined hold some 8 million names of Holocaust-era policyholders, both Jewish and non-Jewish. “They were going to match them with the roughly 500,000 names of known German Jews. But if Allianz as a singular company only turned over 200,000 names, then we won’t know what was in the other 1.3 million policy names that potentially could contain Jewish policyholders.”
On April 30, The International Commission on Holocaust Insurance Claims published a new list of 363,000 names of policyholders. There current deadline to file a claim is Sept. 30.
ICHEIC was created in 1998 by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and comprises representatives from European insurance companies, European insurance regulators, various Jewish organizations and the Israeli government. Because the commission represents opposing interests, its overall effectiveness has been questioned.
“There’s been frustration in terms of how fast they’re working,” explained Stephanie Marquis, spokesperson for Insurance Commissioner Kreidler. Marquis declared that Kreidler and other insurance regulators would press ICHEIC to release more policyholders’ names. In the meantime, she said, “we’re going to continue business as usual: we’re going to continue assisting Holocaust victims and their families process their claims and help them with their paperwork, act on their behalf, advocate for them. We don’t want anybody to feel like the doors are now shut or that our hands are tied.”
Currently, 325 Holocaust-era life insurance claims have been made in the state. Nine claimants have received offers, most ranging from $2,000 to $6,000, although one person received and has accepted an offer of $73,500. Fourteen claimants have died while awaiting offers.
Daniel Kadden, a Holocaust survivor advocate who works on restitution issues both locally and nationally, suggested that the Sept. 30 deadline could be extended if additional names are published in the interim. Kadden pointed out that ICHEIC still had in its possession a “significant” number of policyholder names that it had not yet released. Furthermore, “there has always been a commitment to giving the public time to learn about and access the list, and then family members actually have communication with each other — that’s what usually happens — and someone tries to put together information for a claim. It doesn’t happen within an hour, it takes time,” Kadden said.
Everett resident Fred Taucher, 70, knows this well. Taucher, who lost both parents in the Holocaust, never imagined they had life insurance, although he has always believed they had insurance for their struggling Berlin tailor shop, which Nazi thugs destroyed on Kristallnacht, the night of Nov. 9–10, 1938.
“I remember like it was yesterday,” Taucher recounted last week, “when my mother said, ‘What are we going to do now?’ And my father said, ‘Don’t worry: That is what we have insurance for.’”
Taucher and his brother have tried unsuccessfully to determine which company insured their father’s shop. Over the past 30 years they have inquired with Allianz, which, Taucher believes, sold a lot of business insurance to Jews, especially in Berlin.
“The only answer we ever got back was that, without a policy number, there was no way they could trace if our parents had insurance,” Taucher said.
Upon learning of the new list of 363,000 policyholders published by ICHEIC in April, Taucher made a discovery: “When I found my parents’ names on the Internet, I was amazed to find out they had life insurance,” he said. “I was just confident that they had insurance for their business.”
The current deadline for filing Holocaust-era insurance claims is Sept. 30, 2003.
To check the policyholder lists of the International Commission on Holocaust-Era Insurance Claims (ICHEIC), visit www.icheic.org.
For information on filing claims:
• Log on to the Web site of the Office of the Insurance Commissioner at www.insurance.wa.gov and click on “Site Map,” then click on “Holocaust survivor assistance,” listed under “Information for Consumers.”
• Call the Holocaust Survivors’ Assistance Office at 206-464-6828 or toll-free at 1-888-606-9622.