Bonn Allocates $1,800,000 in Pensions to Jewish Communal Employes

The sum of $1,800,000 has been appropriated by the West German Government for the annual payment of pensions to former rabbis and other officials and employees of Jewish communities who lost their positions when the Nazis came to power. At the same time, these pensions have been given new legal status in a directive published this week in the Reichsgesetzblatt, the Official Gazette of the Federal Government.

The new status affects more than 2,000 rabbis, cantors, teachers, kosher slaughterers, social workers, nurses, physicians, librarians, field organizers and administrative employees who, in the well-organized Jewish life that flourished in Germany prior to Hitler’s advent, were assured of a pension upon reaching retirement age. Most of them fled Germany while there was yet time, some were liberated from Nazi camps in 1945.

Because the German State abolished all Jewish congregations and associations of communities at the height of the Nazi cataclysm, and took over their assets, even those few small communities which have been re-established in present-day West Germany are in no position to discharge the pension responsibilities of their predecessors. For that reason, West Germany undertook to assume these pension payments when it signed the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

The machinery necessary to redeem this pledge was set up in 1953. An “Advisory Committee” established by the Claims Conference has screened some 2,000 applications and forwarded them to the proper German authority, upon whom the decision devolves. The Committee office, located in Bonn, is in charge of Dr. E. G. Lowenthal, a British citizen long active in Jewish communal work in Germany.

While this pensions scheme on behalf of the servants of Germany’s erstwhile Jewish community has been carried out by the Federal Government more fairly and expeditiously than many other aspects of the indemnification program, the legal structure encompassing it has been somewhat tentative. The new directive, which contains a number of improvements and some regressive provisions, puts the scheme on a firm legal foundation.

Minimum pensions for former rabbis or communal officials have been raised from $59.50 a month to $65.50, while minimum pensions for their widows remain at the former figure. The minimum pension for minors who are full orphans, and whose fathers were entitled to a pension, has been increased from $12 a month to $18.

PAYMENTS CAN BE TRANSFERRED TO PENSIONER’S COUNTRY OF RESIDENCE

All payments can be transferred freely to the pensioner’s country of residence and amount to 80 percent of the last salary for the rabbi or communal official; 48 percent for his widow, provided that the marriage was contracted before October 1952; and 20 percent for full orphans under the age of 18 or 12 percent for minor half orphans. Maximum allowances have also been augmented. Maximum monthly payments have been limited to $286 for the rabbi or official, $171 for his widow and $71 for a full orphan.

Through a restrictive clause not hitherto applied, the new directive excludes those officials who entered the employ of a Jewish community, association, educational institution, hospital etc., only after the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. Another provision, which is bound to exert a detrimental effect on Jewish religious life in present-day Germany, bars a rabbi or official now employed by a Jewish body in Germany from receiving the pension due him. This is an innovation which will certainly prove to be a major handicap in the efforts of Jewish communities to recruit former German rabbis as spiritual leaders, at least for a limited period.

For the first time, permanent Christian employees of former Jewish congregations or institutions, who under normal circumstances would have been eligible for a pension, will be able to receive it under the new directive. In recent years, much unfavorable publicity resulted from stories about faithful long-time synagogue sextons or cemetery caretakers now exposed to penury and privation because the small present-day communities cannow shoulder the financial burden and because no one else was willing to assume the liability.

According to the new law, pension applications by former rabbis and other congregational or communal officials can be filed with the Administrative Section of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Bonn until March 31, 1957. Eligibility is restricted to formerly pensionable rabbis or officials who were employed by congregations or institutions within the 1937 borders of Germany or in the City of Danzig. All such pension payments are computed retroactively to October, 1952.