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Last update - 00:00 18/11/2008
Study: Bank Leumi not obliged to return cash to Holocaust victims' heirs
By Tomer Zarchin
Tags: Theodor Or, Israel News 

Bank Leumi is not legally obliged to hand over to heirs money it had held for people who died in the Holocaust, Justice (ret.) Theodor Or says in an internal report he prepared at the request of the bank's board of directors.

Or was asked by the bank's board chairman, Eitan Raff, and legal adviser Ram Caspi to examine its liability in view of the demand of the state-owned Company for Locating and Retrieving Assets of Holocaust Victims for the funds.

The company asked the bank in March for money in 1,299 accounts belonging to Holocaust victims, totaling some NIS 147 million. The company later asked for NIS 250 million more, from some 1,000 additional accounts in the bank.
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Most of the sum consists of revalued accounts, after adding accumulated interest and linkage until 1960, when the bank passed them on to the Custodian General.

In his report Or criticizes the parliamentary committee of inquiry into Holocaust victims' assets, headed by MK Colette Avital (Labor), saying that it has no normative validity. "The committee's conclusions have no binding normative validity. In many issues the law directives are different from the directives at the base of the inquiry committee's examination," he wrote.

The bank has no legal obligation to pay the revalued funds of Holocaust victims, which it held dozens of years ago and passed on as required to the Custodian General, to their owners' heirs, Or said.

"A Holocaust victim was not and could not be the owner of the retroactive revaluation increment. This addition did not exist during the victim's lifetime," he wrote.

The directive obliging banks that held victims' money in the past to pay the revalued sums is an obligation that infringes on their property rights and is opposed to the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty.

Bank Leumi refused to comment on the report, as the board has not reviewed its findings yet. A bank spokesman said the bank was examining the demands of the state-owned company for retrieving victims' assets. Bank Leumi has given the company NIS 20 million for Holocaust victims' heirs, he said.

"It's astonishing that a respectable judge rules that the findings of the historic parliamentary committee have no binding normative authority," MK Avital commented Monday.

She said that although Or was paid by the bank, she expected a judge of his standing not to make statements contradicting similar findings in the world and that have been adopted by the Knesset and cabinet.

Unlike Mrs. Cohen from Hadera, who during the war could take care of her money in the bank, a person who was in Auschwitz was unable to take care of his money, and the bank did whatever it wanted to with it," she said.

Avital said the report washing its hands of paying the revalued funds was "outrageous." She said the banks for years had invested the money of people who died in the Holocaust, and must return it at its true value. "The bank converted the money it held into ridiculously low amounts, and even the cabinet insisted it must be revalued," she said. "Then along comes mister judge, and the bank, instead of paying, starts dragging its feet again."

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