The Bet Zedek Legal Services expressed gratification yesterday over the decision of a federal appeals court in San Francisco that reparations by the West German government to victims of the Holocaust settled in the United States could not be counted as income in determining the recipient’s eligibility for federal disability benefits.
The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting in San Francisco, reversed a ruling last June by a three-judge panel of the same court for Felicia Grunfeder, a resident of Los Angeles.
Grunfeder has been represented by Bet Zedek, an agency of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation Council, since the Social Security Administration had ruled that her reparations, of about $170 per month, boosted her annual income to a point above the level of eligibility in the program, which is based on need.
Her sufferings as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Warsaw left her with psychiatric problems which qualified her for disability benefits under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Those benefits of about $119 a month, plus Medicaid, were terminated by the Social Security Administration in 1980 when it learned about the reparations payments.
CITES ‘JUST AND COMPASSIONATE’ DECISION
Terry Friedman of the Jewish legal service agency said of the reversal, “We’re thrilled. At long last we have a decision which is just and compassionate.”
He said that, of the estimated 50,000 Holocaust survivors living in the United States who get reparations payments, at least 5,000 are eligible for Social Security disability benefits.
After the war, Grunfeder, who had been raised by a Catholic couple, was reunited with her mother, the only other member of the Grunfeder family who survived the Holocaust, and both came to the United States in 1949.
In arguing before the appeals court, the government contended that when Congress amended the Social Security Act, it did not choose to exclude reparations payments from taxable income of Holocaust victims.
RULING BY THE COURT
But Judge Harry Pregerson, writing for the 7-4 majority in the appeals court decision, ruled that Congress had shown an intent to exclude reparations payments by taking other steps to recognize the special problems of Holocaust survivors, such as excluding reparations payments from taxable income.
The ruling held that “Holocaust survivors receive reparations payments to make amends for past injustices and horrors perpetrated against them by the Nazis. These payments are not designed to support basic needs.” The ruling held that counting reparations payments as taxable income would frustrate their “penitent and restitutionary purposes.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
