Insurers Must Attend Holocaust Claims Hearing

Representatives from insurance companies that owe restitution for unpaid claims of Holocaust survivors must appear at a state hearing in Los Angeles on Dec. 1 to determine if they are prepared to comply with the Holocaust Registry law, state insurance commissioner Chuck Quackenbush said Tuesday.

More than 20,000 people who survived Nazi concentration camps in World War II now reside in California and many of them are owed as much as hundreds of millions of dollars by European insurance companies who now do business in the state, Quackenbush said.

Companies that don’t quickly move to comply with the state law, which requires insurance complies to release the names of unpaid policyholders from before World War II, will find themselves “thrown out of California,” the commisioner added.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Assemblyman Wally Knox (D-Los Angeles), author of the law, joined Quackenbush at Tuesday’s press conference. The announcement came on the 61st anniversary of Kristallnacht, known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” which many believe signaled the start of the Holocaust. On that night, Nazi soldiers looted and burned Jewish synagogues and businesses across Germany.

At the end of WWII, many insurance companies refused to pay out life-insurance policies on Jews who had perished in the camps, saying they could not write checks without proof of death