Germans plan to pay Baltic Jews

MOSCOW, Sept. 21 (JTA) – A German province is planning to compensate – and lobby for – Lithuania’s Holocaust survivors. The Brandenburg Parliament has already earmarked several thousand dollars to compensate Jews living in the Baltic nation, and it intends to ask the German government to further compensate these survivors, according to Herbert Knoblich, the chairman of the province’s Parliament. Knoblich made the comments in a meeting with the leadership of Lithuania’s Jewish community in Vilnius, the country’s capital. Some public organizations, companies and individuals from Brandenburg, which is located in eastern Germany, have already offered to aid some members of the Lithuanian Jewish community. Over 90 percent of Lithuania’s prewar Jewish community of 250,000 was exterminated during the Nazi occupation. Lithuanian survivors, like Holocaust survivors in other parts of the former Soviet Union, were unable to file for individual compensation from Germany during the Cold War.