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Director of Company for Restitution: Premium TA neighborhood built on Holocaust victims' land By Tomer Zarchin The Company for Restitution of Holocaust Victims Assets suspects that a specific area of land north of Tel Aviv may have been owned by unidentified Holocaust victims. Requests made by the company of both the court-appointed administrators of these lands, and the custodian general in the Justice Ministry, for a list of the suspect lots, have gone unanswered. The lands, north of the Yarkon River and west of the newer area of Ramat Aviv as far as the beach, known as the "large bloc," consist of 1,067 dunams (about 267 acres) and constitute some of the city's most expensive real estate. Apartment houses have been built on some of it, as well as the Sde Dov airport. Advertisement In the coming days, the Company for Restitution is to apply to the appeals committee set up to assist it, with a demand to instruct the administrators to reveal to which lands have unknown owners. The appeals committee has the authority to demand the appearance and testimony of officials about property believed to belong to Holocaust victims. The Company for Restitution, established by the 2006 Holocaust Victims Assets Law, is empowered to identify and coordinate all assets in Israel about which there are grounds to assume that their owners perished in the Holocaust. Its deputy director, Yishai Amrani, said "there are real indications" that the large bloc includes lands belonging to Holocaust victims. He said the administrators of the large bloc had done a survey of unidentified lands and given it to the custodian general, Shlomo Shahar, but that Shahar had not responded to the company's request for that information. In response, the Justice Ministry spokesman said that a year ago, Shahar had given the Company for Restitution "not only the list of assets it had administered, but also the assets themselves. Unacceptably, the company approached the administrators of the large bloc, without informing the custodian general, and asked them for a list of assets they had given to the custodian, including those that do not belong to Holocaust victims." The spokesman also said the company "would be better off focusing on doing its job of restoring property transferred to it by the custodian general and other bodies to the heirs of Holocaust victims, and soon, rather than acting unacceptably vis-a-vis the custodian general, since in any case it enjoys the complete cooperation of the custodian." Amrani said in response: "I expect full cooperation, and they should not be afraid to give the company all the information. Nothing is going into my pocket, but rather to the heirs." The company will also be approaching the appeals committee to demand details about a property suspected of belonging to Holocaust victims that is in the possession of a private real estate company, Yachin-Hakal. The company says Yachin-Hakal has not cooperated by giving it the required information. Yesterday Haaretz reported that according to an internal report compiled by Dr. Nissim Sharifi, the attorney of the Company for Restitution, the security officer of the Finance Ministry in the 1950s ordered the destruction of all files involving real estate belonging to Holocaust victims. Sharifi's report mentions 31 assets belonging to Holocaust victims in the Netanya, Tel Mond and Hadar Am areas. MK Colette Avital (Labor) who headed the parliamentary committee of inquiry on restitution of assets of Holocaust victims in Israel, said a law should be passed allowing the Company for Restitution to look at bills of sale in the lands registration bureau. Amrani confirmed that the land registration bureaus in many cases do not allow the owners of suspect properties to be identified. Following yesterday's story in Haaretz, heirs of Holocaust victims approached the paper to complain of the slow work of the Company for Restitution, also with regard to bank accounts and other property that it had publicized on its Internet site as belonging to Holocaust victims. It is believed the land of the large bloc originally had some 1,400 owners, who purchased it in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1978, some of the original owners approached the court to claim their lands, and the court appointed six attorneys as administrators. Some of the land owners were subsequently able to sell their land beginning in 1993, and apartment houses began to be built. Sde Dov airport, slated for evacuation, still stands on 43 percent of the land. Guy Lieberman contributed to this report. Bookmark to del.icio.us   No light at the end Amira Hass / Powerless in Gaza, residents rely on the tunnels. Offensive strikes Report: U.S. secretly attacked dozens of Mideast targets since 2004.

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