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Compensation 101

Hundreds of survivors are expected Sunday to
attend a "how to" conference on Holocaust claims.

PHIL JACOBS EDITOR

R

West Bloomfield is slowly but surely
ing a place of choice for
m
_
observant Jews.

LYNNE MEREDITH COHN STAt 4V., i;1111

abbi Herschel Roth was
taken along with his par-
ents and six siblings in
June of 1944 from their
Hungarian village of Kahlev to
the death camps at Auschwitz.
He was a 17-year-old yeshiva
boy. He was the only one in his
family to survive. He said his
mother and the six children were
"made into soap." His father died
a week before the Americans lib-
erated the camp. He has a
certificate with his name and fin-
gerprints authenticating his stay
at Auschwitz.
He doesn't need a piece of pa-
per to authenticate anything. His
memories have been stamped
and sealed.
Yet, after all that he has seen
and been through, the 71-year-
old former sexton of Congrega-
tion B'nai David hasn't received
a penny in compensation from
the German government. He
has been turned down by the or-
ganization facilitating the distri-
bution of German funds to
survivors, the Conference on Jew-

ish Material Claims Against Ger-
many, known as the Claims Con-
ference. -
The reason: Rabbi Roth's pen-
sion and Social Security pay-
ments put him slightly over the
$16,000 annual income that
serves as the cutoff for what the
Claims Conference calls "hard-
ship cases."
On Sunday, Rabbi Roth and
several hundred other survivors
and their families are expected
to come to Congregation Shaarey
Zedek for what could be the na-
tion's biggest conference to date
on compensation for Holocaust
survivors. The meeting is sched-
uled for 1 to 3:30 p.m. It is open
to the public and free of charge.
Free transportation is available
from both campuses of the Jew-
ish Community Center.
The idea behind the conference
is to give survivors information
on how to collect compensation,
according to Fran Victor. A local
video producer, she put the con-

COMPENSATION page 24

eturning The

A Harvard professor has laid bare the motives
behind the murder of six million Jews

JULIE EDGAR SENIOR WRITER

iipaniel Jonah Goldhagen, author
of Hitler's Willing Executioners,
stopped by The Jewish News dur-
ing a media tour of the metro
area last week. He spoke about
the controversial book, its recep-
tion by critics and general read-
ers, and his next project.

very Shabbat, people trek
across Maple, Farmington
or Orchard Lake roads, to
pray, eat with friends, learn
about Judaism. Rain, sun or snow
— they walk to daven at one of
three growing Orthodox shuls in
West Bloomfield.
No longer are the northwestern
suburbs home to only secular, Re-
form and Conservative Jews. The
West Bloomfield community that
has grown in population and af-
fluence for more than two decades

mow claims among its inhabitants
a small-but-devout core of obser-
vant Jews.
They've come from out-of-town
as well as from the traditional en-
claves of Oak Park and Southfield
for bigger houses and open spaces.
They are, in a way, pioneers.
Rabbi Elimelech Silberberg
came to West Bloomfield 23 years
ago, at the behest of the regional
director of the Chabad Lubavitch
of Michigan, Rabbi Berel Shem-
tov.

"The first 10 years were the
toughest ... trying to get a nucle-
us of people who are observant,
developing ba'alei teshuvah (new-
ly observant) ... in order to be able
to influence people, you have to
have a core group that serve as
your models," Rabbi Silberberg
says.
Although Bais Chabad of West
Bloomfield—on Maple Road west
of Orchard Lake Road — has the

WALK page 18

D

aniel Jonah Goldhagen
never thought he'd become
a media celebrity when he
wrote Hitler's Willing Ex-
ecutioners, a book that disman-
tles the myths that underlie
much of the literature written on
the Holocaust.
Yet Dr. Goldhagen, a political
science professor at Harvard
University, is not completely un-
fazed by the acclaim the book has
received here and abroad. He
claims he has gone where other
Holocaust scholars have failed to
go — to the ordinary people be-
hind the slaughter of six million

Jews — and done it in a way that
is accessible to a broad audience.
Since the book came out a year
ago, Dr. Goldhagen has toured a
lot of the planet, giving inter-
views, signing copies, deba
his critics.
wIthe book prow es an enor-
mous amount of new informa-
tion about these people, about
the details of their deeds, and
fundamentally shifts the focus
in the study of the Holocaust
from where it has been — which
is on abstract institutions and
structures, the SS, the Nazi Par-
ty, the terror apparatus — back
to the human beings. People
have responded with enormous
interest to learn, to ask new
questions and cast doubt on
things which they had accepted
to be true, which I don't believe
are true," he said.
Arguably, the book's real tri-

SHOAH page 25

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