NYU Law Professor Burt Neuborne Gets His Due -- New York Magazine

Getting His Due

In the opinion of Holocaust survivor Leo Rechter, an unpaid activist and founder of the grassroots National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors, Neuborne's actions are "immoral."

(Photo: Elinor Carucci)

The case was about billions deposited by European Jews in Swiss banks for safekeeping on the eve of World War II and never returned. Previous efforts to get the money back failed. But with the remaining Holocaust survivors reaching their final years, momentum was building for one more try. “It was an opportunity to finally get closure for a lot of people who lived through a horrible part of history,” says the class-action attorney Melvyn Weiss, who also worked on the case.

Neuborne attended Harvard Law and worked as a tax attorney on Wall Street before finding his calling in civil-rights and public-interest law. For all his experience arguing before the Supreme Court, he had relatively little in international law and no real involvement with the Jewish community. Still, the more he considered it, the more attracted he was. When she died, Lauren was studying to become a rabbi, a big departure for his family. “She apologized to us for going into rabbinical school,” he says. “We were intensely secular. [My wife] was the director of the now Legal Defense and Education Fund. I headed the ACLU legal program. To the extent that we had a religion, it was the Bill of Rights, and we worshipped it.” Neuborne came to believe that seeking justice for Holocaust survivors would be “extending the arc of Lauren’s life in some way.” And so he entered the case, working for free.

The work was a salvation, at least at first. “A life preserver,” is how Neuborne puts it. He played a starring role during eight hours of oral arguments in federal court—talking so long, he says, “my face hurt.” The Swiss banks waved the white flag. In August 1998, after twelve consecutive days of negotiations, they agreed to the $1.25 billion payout. Neuborne’s work, however, was only beginning.

The settlement was silent on how the money should be divided. This was deliberate. “Everybody punted,” Neuborne says. “Everybody was so pleased to get $1.25 billion that nobody wanted to even think at that point how it was going to be allocated.” And so, in January 1999, five months after the banks capitulated, the judge—Edward Korman of Brooklyn federal court—urged Neuborne to return in the role of lead settlement counsel. It became Neuborne’s responsibility to represent hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors covered by the settlement in the crucial decisions about who would get what. The job proved far more complex and controversial than anybody imagined.

Although the settlement compensated Swiss-bank-account holders, there were other groups of survivors who were eligible, including a “looted assets” class—for example, survivors whose gold and jewelry had been seized by the Nazis and fenced by Swiss banks. In a typical class-action case, each class of plaintiffs has a lawyer representing its interests in dividing the settlement. But Neuborne and the judge thought such an adversarial scramble of elderly survivors would be tragic. They developed an alternative: Survivors were asked to accept the settlement—giving up their legal claims to the banks—before they knew what they would get. Neuborne would represent not any one class of survivors but everyone. Of the hundreds of thousands covered by the class action, no more than a few hundred opted out of this arrangement.

Then Judge Korman (largely following the proposal of a special master tasked with devising a plan) decided that the looted-assets survivors would get nothing at all. There were just too many of them, he reasoned, and how could anyone prove which looted assets ended up in Switzerland? Korman ruled that using their $100 million share of the settlement to help destitute survivors would be the “next best thing.” He ordered that 75 percent of the aid for Jewish survivors be spent in the former Soviet Union, where he considered the needs overwhelming; 21 percent would go to other foreign nations. Only 4 percent would be used to help survivors in the U.S. And that’s the root of the trouble.

Leo Rechter, the 79-year-old leader of the 1,100-member National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors, avoided the Nazis by hiding in plain sight. Born in Vienna, he spent much of World War II in Brussels, and because he was blond-haired and blue-eyed, no one suspected he was a Jew. Rechter did everything a young teenager could to provide for his mother and two sisters. He sold bread and old clothing and peddled cigarettes made from discarded butts. Tenacity saved his life, and when he ushers me into his rowhouse in Jamaica, Queens, one night, it becomes clear that that tenacity continues to define it.

After retiring from his position as a bank president at 65, Rechter explains, he volunteered for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, traveling around the city to videotape scores of survivors’ remembrances. He was struck by how many survivors were in need. “I was appalled that in the richest country on earth, there are survivors who cannot afford their dentures, their medications, their dialysis,” he says. The experience propelled him into his current activist phase. In his dining room are two large bureaus filled with files of the organization’s work. Rechter reaches into one, grabs a folder, and hands it to me. It contains several neatly labeled files: SWISS BANKS CASE, NEUBORNE’S PROMISE, NEUBORNE’S STATEMENTS, AND DISTORTIONS. “In my opinion, what Mr. Neuborne has done is immoral,” Rechter says.