MK Colette Avital, to right a wrong
Photo: Lauren Lions
Yad Vashem
Photo: Reuters
List of Holocaust victims' assets published on net
Relatives of people who perished in Holocaust can claim assets, accounts belonging to victims
The society for restituting property belonging to victims of the Holocaust published Wednesday a list of 3,500 bank accounts and real estate properties located in Israel, worth over NIS 100 million ($25 million), that belong to Holocaust victims.
The list was published on the internet site www.hashava.org.il. Relatives of the victims can examine the list to locate assets that legally belong to them.
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The society has declared that this is only an initial list that includes assets that were under guardianship of the General Custodian, the Jewish National Fund and a list of bank accounts that was published at the Knesset.
Descendants of the owners of assets that do not appear on the list can submit a request to a service center formed for this purpose.
The society's manager, Yishai Amrami, who also served as director-general of Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, said: "The society is facing a complicated and challenging task of reconstructing events that occurred many decades ago.
"The goal of our society is to locate property that belonged to those who perished in the Shoah and to find their legal heirs in as short a time as possible. During the last few months, the society has been set up so that the public can contact it as conveniently as possible, and we tried to make the procedures as simple and straightforward as possible," he added.
The society was given the mandate by the law of restitution of Holocaust victims' assets to do anything required in order to restitute all the assets in Israel to the owners' heirs and rightful owners. The law was legislated by the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee for the Location and Restitution of Assets of Holocaust Victims, headed by MK Colette Avital.
"I am delighted that all the hard work producing results in the form of the society, whose goal is to create historical justice and return property to holocaust victim's heirs," said Avital to Ynet.
"I wish, from the bottom of my heart, great success to the members of the society in finding the heirs as soon possible and fulfilling all of the tasks it was established for. This will be their contribution to correcting a historical wrongdoing that was caused to all of their victims and descendents," she said.
