Austria, Israel and the Jews: We are on the Right Path

OTS (02/19/2006)

President Khol as Host to the
European Jewish Congress (EJC) General Assembly

Vienna Tonight, the President of the National Council, Andreas Khol called the relationship between the Jewish community in Austria and the State of Israel as well as the Austrian government a positive one without problems. The Austrian Parliament is a friend of Israel, summarized Khol. During the course of a festive dinner in which Khol invited the European Jewish Congress on the occasion of their 1st General Assembly in Vienna at the Epstein Palace, Kohl also spoke about the current situation. He hopes that the Middle East Road Map will be continued following the victorious elections of Hamas; this is important for us all, emphasized Khol. The President of the National Council then spoke of the conflict surrounding the Mohammed caricatures and termed it a threat to human rights and the respect for the rule of law, and to the right of voicing differences of opinion without violence. All of these values should be protected. Khol appeared happy over the attitude revealed by the Jewish youth towards Austria: They feel secure and take themselves to be a natural part of society. Those are signs that we are on the right path, said President Khol.

Jews feel good and they feel at home in Austria, said President of the European Jewish Congress, Pierre Besnainou, and the relations between Austria and Israel are also good. Two events had shaped the 20th century, continued Besnainou further: the Holocaust and the independence of the State of Israel. Now, however, the Holocaust was being denied by the Iranian President, and Israel was threatened to be destroyed. This demands concrete steps, warned Besnainou: It is unthinkable that someone who calls for genocide should be received by one of the twenty-five countries of the European Union (EU): He can also not imagine that European countries can conduct talks with a terrorist organization like Hamas as long as it invokes the destruction of the State of Israel, violates existing agreements and spreads further terror.

Summarizing his view of things, Ariel Muzicant, President of the Israelite Religious Community, concluded that things have changed. Not all, but many Jews in Austria are no longer sitting on packed suitcases. It is also a good sign for the majority when minorities feel secure, said Muzicant. He showed satisfaction over the solution to the questions of restitution.

Charlotte Knobloch, Vice President of the European Jewish Congress and of the Jewish Wold Congress, began speaking of her experience in Germany after the war. In 1945 her wish was to stay not one day longer in Germany. Fifteen years later, however, following the success of a project of some 57 million euros which was completed with the financial support of the State of Bavaria and the City of Munich and not on the periphery of the city but in the heart of the city - she unpacked her suitcase because the Jewish Community had come home to Munich.

President Khol greeted, among others, Israel’s Ambassador to Austria, Dan Ashbel, Secretary General of the European Jewish Congress, Serge Cwajgenbaum, Secretary General of the Jewish World Congress, Stephen E. Herbits, Chief Rabbi Paul Chaim Eisenberg and Chairman of the Green Party, Alexander Van der Bellen.

Wolfmayr: Austrian Restitution Law Exemplary

Austrian Press Agency (APA) (01/30/2006)

Calls for change unfounded

Vienna. Austria’s restitution law of 1998 is exemplary worldwide, emphasized Dr. Andrea Wolfmayr today, Spokeswoman for Cultural Affairs of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and member of Parliament. Research on establishing ownership (provenance) is unique, lawfully binding, and tries not only to establish the comprehensive source of new entries into national collections from the year 1938 to 1945 and onward, but also looks for the legal successors of the original owners. Thus, many legitimate claimants could be researched who had no knowledge of their claim, said Ms. Wolfmayr to the statements issued by the Green Party’s Spokeswoman for Judicial Affairs, Ms. Stoisits.

To simply wait until justifiable claims are filed is just wrong. Legitimate claims were actively investigated with help of the Israelite Religious Community (IKG). Compared to restitution procedures internationally, Austria’s are based upon a legal framework. Provenance research and restitution are legally safeguarded, said Wolfmayr. This is different from, let’s say Holland, where there is only a political declaration of intent but no legal obligation regarding restitution of cultural objects. Thus, in contrast to Austria, a change of course regarding intent of return would be possible at a moment’s notice.

Moreover, Austria has abolished the ban on exports for restituted art objects, which is not the case for Germany and the Czech Republic, where the ban on exports is still valid. The laws governing restitution were also consciously set up in such a way that the claims are processed within the shortest time period possible, said Wolfmayr. Positions taken by the party (party line) would draw out the proceedings. Provenance research cooperates closely together with those concerned and takes into consideration each and every claim.

The "Restitutionsbeirat" (Advisory Council on Restitution) has held thirty-three meetings since 1998 and recommended the return of a total of 5,063 art objects (due date: January 18, 2006), emphasized Wolfmayr. Almost all of the cases submitted to the Council, with very few exceptions, received a positive decision. That shows that Austrian restitution law is exemplary worldwide and is oriented toward the interests of those concerned. Therefore, there appears to be no need for change, concluded Wolfmayr.

Institute for Holocaust Studies

Die Presse Online (01/31/2006) www.diepresse.at/Artikel.aspx?channel=p&ressort=i&id=536074
Taken from an article in APA


The political scientist, Anton Pelinka, explained: The Institute will provide a worthy framework for the archives and legacy of Simon Wiesenthal.*

An international center for Holocaust research is to be built in Vienna and named after Simon Wiesenthal who passed away last year in September 2005. Initiators of this project to create the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) gave a presentation at the University of Vienna last Monday evening. The political scientist, Anton Pelinka, director of the VWI explained: The institute will provide a worthy framework for the archives and the legacy of Simon Wiesenthal.

Simon Wiesenthal personally took part in the conception of the institute. He wanted the archive to stay in Vienna under certain conditions, said Pelinka. Fulfilling Wiesenthal’s wish, the VWI will devote itself to researching and documenting questions concerning anti-Semitism, racism and the Holocaust. The institute is an offer made to Vienna and Austria, commented Pelinka, emphasizing the importance of research. It would be an institute putting Austria on the map of international Holocaust research.

The main core of the institute will be Wiesenthal’s collection of some 8,000 documents, including written records spanning decades of his search for justice for the crimes committed by National Socialism. The Institute will also contain the archive of the Jewish Religious Community (IKG) in Vienna.

The IKG supported the applications for restitution submitted by about 14,000 NS victims. To this end it relied upon its historical archive, which is now fully reconstructed, but was partially scattered about during and after the war. Valuable documents, such as files containing names of Jews who were expelled from Vienna during Nazi rule, were discovered in Vienna.

During the 1950s and 60s, large segments of the archive were permanently loaned to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. The central office in Jerusalem had large segments some 1.3 million single documents put on microfilm, an undertaking which will be completed sometime this year. After that, the largest archive of a Jewish community in the world will be accessible for research in Vienna.

According to the estimates of historians, both collections are one-of-a-kind in terms of their international significance. What is lacking is an appropriate institution that would make public and professional use possible, and the VWI would bridge the gap. Belonging to the organizations supporting the project are, among others, the Archive on the Documentation of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and the International Research Center for Cultural Research.

Internationally renowned scientists such as Omer Bartov, Micha Brumlik, Dan Diner and Bertrand Perz are already involved in the project. The VWI will have a very strong outreach program hosting classes, lectures, exhibitions and readings. The IKG has offered to house the institute in a 3,000 sq. ft. area in the center of Vienna. Building costs amount to some 14.5 million euros, while costs for running the institute come to almost 2.5 million euros.

Currently talks are being conducted on state and national levels. The City of Vienna has already given the signal for financial support along with the federal government. Officials hope for initial results in February. We are assured of a breakthrough and that the necessary political decisions will be made, explained the director of the IKG central office, Ingo Zechner, to the Austrian Press Agency (AOA). Plans for completion are set for 2009/2010.

Austria Comes to Terms With Its Past

Forward (12/16/2005)
by Stuart Eizenstat

Last week, after a federal judge in New York dismissed the last major Holocaust restitution case against the government of Austria and several private Austrian corporations, Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel told President Bush that he was declaring "legal peace." The Austrian leader then called me and said in emotional terms that it was a "moment of great joy."


Austria, Schüssel said, would now be able to immediately pay $210 million into the General Settlement Fund, the last remaining part of a nearly $1 billion Austrian-American agreement that I negotiated with him in the final hours of the Clinton administration almost five years ago. The first payments, he told me, would be made "before Christmas."


That Holocaust victims will finally receive this deserved money is indeed, as Schüssel said, cause for joy. But it is also significant in another regard. At a time of Muslim unrest and lingering anti-Semitism in segments of Europe, it represents a twin triumph: a nation moving from the shadows of long-denied Nazi complicity in World War II into the sunlight of acceptance of its historic responsibility, and a chancellor proving his critics wrong, playing a historic role for his people and striking a blow for the fight against anti-Semitism.


The $210 million payment into the General Settlement Fund will mean that 19,300 claimants from around the world finally will have the chance to prove their claim and divide the sum on a pro-rata basis, with a maximum recovery of up to $2 million each for liquidated businesses; property converted to private use; looted bank accounts, stocks, bonds, mortgages and movable property, and unpaid insurance policies. Even before the chancellor's declaration of "legal peace" last week, the three-person claims committee we created in 2001 already had reached a decision on 2,700 cases. The rest of the 19,300 cases should be decided by the spring of 2007, and Austrian officials have assured me that the oldest claimants will be sent to the front of the line.


"Legal peace" also will activate a part of our agreement that allows victims of Nazi persecution to get back the actual real property confiscated by the Nazis, if it remains in the Austrian government's hands. There are 80 claims pending, and a separate tribunal created under our 2001 agreement already has decided seven cases, three favorably.


In a delicious irony, one of the successful claims will return looted property that now houses the Vienna offices of the United States Information Agency. The American government will leave the building, which the Austrian government took over after the war and leased for decades to Washington, and it will be returned to its rightful prewar owners.


Last week's decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which opened the door to "legal peace," validates the unique alternative dispute resolution process the Clinton administration developed to settle the major Holocaust restitution cases involving Austria, Germany and France. In dismissing the claims against the Austrian government, the Court of Appeals deferred to the American foreign policy interests that led us to create an international forum to compensate victims outside the American system.


When we were negotiating the agreement, we recognized that with hundreds of thousands of surviving victims, the traditional trial system never would have worked in the victims' lifetime. And indeed, until last week a few lawyers who objected to our agreement, assisted by a federal judge who sat on the case for five years, were able to delay justice to tens of thousands of needy Holocaust survivors and their families. Since we negotiated the agreement, the number of living Austrian Holocaust survivors fell to 13,000 from 21,000.


At least for the survivors still alive today, justice is no longer delayed. Shortly after the Court of Appeals decision the federal district court judge thankfully dismissed the case against the private Austrian corporations, and in the process helped strengthen the Austrian Jewish community. The case's dismissal was based on a stipulation negotiated by Andreas Kohl, president of the Austrian parliament, under which the organized Austrian Jewish community will receive roughly $40 million to support its struggling institutions. The contributions, given equally by the Austrian federal government and the provincial governments, will relieve some of the personal financial burden that has been carried by Ariel Muzicant, head of the organized Austrian Jewish community.


The declaration of "legal peace" also represents a personal vindication for Schüssel, and enhances the moral authority of Austria less than a month before the country assumes the rotating presidency of the European Union.
Following inconclusive parliamentary elections in October 1999, Schüssel, leader of the People's Party, became chancellor by making a controversial pact with Jörg Haider. Schüssel's alliance with the Freedom Party leader an aggressive, xenophobic nationalist who built a political career on the far right by speaking at gatherings of Austrian S.S. veterans and offering apologies for Nazis crimes provoked a diplomatic firestorm. Unprecedented diplomatic sanctions were levied against Austria by its fellow E.U. member states, and the Clinton administration pursued a policy of "restricted contacts" with Vienna.


The chancellor told me, in our first meeting, that his political strategy was to isolate Haider within his own party and to strengthen the moderate elements within the Freedom Party. And it worked: Haider has lost control over his party, and is an increasingly marginal political force in Austria.


Schüssel was a tough but fair negotiating partner whose leadership was indispensable to our agreement. His declaration of legal peace last week places his final stamp on the historic 2001 agreement.


The declaration represents more than just a financial settlement. It amounts more broadly to Austria, 60 years after the end of World War II, coming to terms with its past and more fully recognizing its responsibilities to the victims of the Third Reich. For decades after the war, Austrians clung to the myth that they had been the "first victims" of Hitler's aggression, rather than his willing accomplices that, as the Viennese coffee house joke went, Austrians believed that the German-born Beethoven was in fact an Austrian and the Austrian-born Hitler was really a German.


It was not until the 1980s that Austria was forced to take a harder look at its wartime record, when the full record of former United Nations secretary general and Austrian president Kurt Waldheim's service in the German army was uncovered by the World Jewish Congress. Gradually, Austria's political leaders began to speak up, but many Austrians still clung to past myths, while justice to its victims was never fully achieved.


With the declaration of "legal peace," Austria now has come full circle, and it will be a stronger nation for its actions. Austria has gone beyond our 2001 agreement, which only required the federal government to return Nazi looted property. Several provinces and cities, including Vienna, are voluntarily agreeing to return looted property they control, and the filing deadline for all cases has been extended until December 2006.
But perhaps no development is more telling than this: In today's Austria, it is not innocent Jews who sit in prison, but the notorious British academic David Irving, jailed on charges of breaking Austria's law against denying the Holocaust. For once in our troubled world, there is good news to report good for Austria, good for Holocaust survivors, good for binding old wounds and good for the cause of fighting anti-Semitism in Europe.


Stuart Eizenstat was President Clinton's special representative on Holocaust-era issues. He negotiated the Holocaust restitution agreement between Austria and the United States in 2001, while serving as deputy secretary of the Treasury.

Flowers in Memory of NS Victims

Der Standard (02/15/2006)(kri) 

Project of commemoration undertaken by school children: 80,000 roses are to give the victims a symbolic home

Vienna .The 80,000 Austrian victims of National Socialism who were robbed, expelled and murdered, were also our neighbors who were violently torn from society. Many individual initiatives have already traced the paths of former residents and have led to the erection of commemorative plaques at places where they once lived. On May 5, the National Day of Commemoration against Violence and Racism, the victims will be symbolically returned to their homes under the project, "Flowers of Memory."

Within the larger framework of "A Letter to the Stars," begun in 2003, school children, together with survivors, will bring 80,000 white roses to places throughout Austria where NS victims lived immediately before their deportation (see: www.lettertothestars.at in German only). This serves to document where racism has led and where xenophobia and intolerance can lead today if one isn’t prepared to learn from history, as Andreas Kuba, one of the initiators emphasized on Tuesday.

Also represented on the prominent support committee is former Styrian Governor, Waltraud Klasnic. She came to the presentation of the project in her new function as head of the Future Fund. Her intention is, said Klasnic, to promote permanent awareness, emphasizing, above all, the meaning of dialogue between generations.

This is an essential part of "Flowers of Memory:" Thousands of school children have researched and documented the personal stories of some 65,000 Holocaust victims and survivors registered in a database established by the Archives on the Documentation of Austrian Resistance (DÖW). The database also allows for survivors as well as relatives of former neighbors to be contacted.

On May 5, the roses which were planted on Stephansplatz will be picked and placed before the house doors. Since many of the persecuted were brought from the provinces and placed in collective housing in Austria’s capital, the majority of addresses were located in Vienna. Altogether some 62,000 addresses were researched and found. For the contemporary witness, Angelika Bäumer, the white rose as a symbol for resistance but also for innocence appears to arouse almost too much pathos.

This is, however, necessary; otherwise such initiatives would not find resonance among the public. Alfred Worm, President of the Support Committee, drew attention to the fact that the current 800 survivors are still waiting to be called to Austria. One hopes that the visits, organized by the Jewish Welcome Service, will be financed by means taken from the Future Fund headed by Klasnic.

Forgotten Camps
On Tuesday was the opening of the exhibit, "We Hadn’t Even Begun to Live", initiated by the Child Psychiatrist Ernst Berger. The exhibit documents the fate of about 3,000 children and young people who were branded as difficult to rear, or characterized as criminal or outsiders to the community, and housed in so-called police youth protection camps. The exhibit on the Lost Camps can be viewed until March 5 in the Volkshochschule Favoriten, and from March 15 to April 7 in Vienna’s Urania.