Of course we are pleased when Weltwoche is talked about. But we were rather surprised when an article created headlines before it was even published. Three weeks ago in New York the Jewish weekly Forward reported that the World Jewish Congress (WJC) resorted to court action in order to try to prevent publication of an article. During this period the Weltwoche team of Daniel Ganzfried and Sebastian Hefti in the USA and Israel investigated the history and activities of the WJC, which is particularly well known in Switzerland as the organization which relieved the banks of billions in ‘restitution’ for dormant accounts. We were willing to have lawyers appointed by the WJC present at the editorial process and in the district court. The article by Ganzfried and Hefti, amongst other things, demonstrates that Israel Singer, the best-known face of the WJC, employed the title of "doctor" without being entitled to do so.

Jurg Wildberger

The eternal restitution seeker

By Daniel Ganzfried and Sebastian Hefti

Israel Singer has shown the Swiss banks how they can be relieved of billions without any criminal activity. Now the figurehead of the World Jewish Congress has been exposed as being involved in mismanagement. But what would represent the end for other people only means that the rabbi flies even higher.

Universal moral indignation: Rabbi Israel Singer prays in Jerusalem for the health of Ariel Sharon, January 2006. Picture: Stefan Zaklin (EPA, Keystone)

It was a spectacular raid across the Europe of the late twentieth century. Within five years a Jewish organization in New York won between 10 and 20 billion dollars from the old continent in restitution. The name of the association: the World Jewish Congress, or WJC. Its best known face is General Secretary Rabbi Israel Singer, also known as Dr. Israel Singer. His address: 501 Madison Avenue, the main street in the global village of Public Relations.

Israel Singer was empowered by a dozen lobbyists and solicitors from Israel and the USA. Their breakthrough began in 1995 with the campaign against Switzerland. There were lots of bank accounts here which had been dormant since the Second World War. Their realistic nominal value together with interest and compound interest amounted to about 60 million dollars. But fifty years after Hitler’s suicide this was no longer what counted. In tapping these bank accounts they found the key to a treasure which they bumped up to several billion. Thanks to political and legal support from the USA, in a historic settlement with the major Swiss banks in 1998 they arrived at a final sum of 1.25 billion dollars. The banks also had to pay about the same amount again in various cost items. The biggest: the auditing process under Paul A. Volcker, former head of the USA’s Federal Reserve Bank, which lasted over four years. This audit alone cost half a billion dollars. The rest was taken up by payments to lawyers, PR agents and internal costs which are still ongoing today.

The men from the WJC call this ‘restitution’. What they claimed to make good was no less than all the suffering and damage inflicted on the Jewish people by Europe during the Second World War. The restitution seekers were in agreement with the government of Israel. They also had the backing of US President Bill Clinton and his wife, both parties of the US Congress and both of its houses. This was the moral economy at work, the idea that even ethical values such as guilt, catharsis or repentance in the end are commodities to be traded. Under their banner class actions, boycotts, sanctions and other weapons of the economic war were regarded as legitimate means to achieve the greatest possible effect. The only prerequisite was that they should originate from a discourse on universal morality. And for that there were few brands more suitable than that of the World Jewish Congress. And no public face was better than that of the doctor-rabbi from Brooklyn, New York, who bears the image of his universal folklore in his forename: Israel Singer, born in 1942.

He and his WJC demonstrated their campaigning energy for the first time at the end of the Eighties. It was only a few years since Edgar Miles Bronfman Sr., born in 1929, the heir to the Canadian distillers Seagram, had rescued the association which was registered in Switzerland from impending bankruptcy and insignificance. Since then the supreme label World Jewish Congress has been associated with the gigantic empire of the philanthropic Bronfman dynasty. It was Bronfman and Singer who acted jointly on the PR stage in New York, where they had moved the association’s headquarters from Geneva. They helped to put the Austrian President Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past into the media spotlight to such an extent that the one-time Secretary General of the United Nations became persona non grata internationally and throughout his whole period in office from 1986 to 1992 could make almost no state visits, except to Vatican City.

Simply because they could

In fact at that time the WJC was living on its legendary past. It is closely connected with Nahum Goldmann (1895–1982), who founded the WJC in Geneva in 1936, thereby creating the only Zionist organisation which registered resistance to the Nazis. In 1952 it arranged the groundbreaking Luxembourg Agreement between post-war Germany, the Jewish State and the Jewish Claims Conference which was specially formed under private law. The Federal Republic under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer paid Israel collective restitution for Nazi crimes and authorised the Claims Conference to pay individual claims to Jewish survivors outside Israel. Israel thus became the legal successor to Jews murdered by the Nazis and consolidated the doctrine of representing the successors and survivors in their totality. For all generations. A doctrine which has so far protected Israel against criticism and interference and, where necessary, has also provided the WJC and its changing management with a part in the chorus of Zionism.

The WJC had had its baptism of fire ten years before the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952. In the year of Israel Singer’s birth, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, the Nazis adopted the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, the industrial mass murder of European Jews. Gerhart Riegner, a young solicitor with the WJC in Geneva, was one of the first to receive information of what no-one wanted to believe. His telegram to the US Foreign Ministry which was later to become famous, in which he warned of the systematic annihilation as early as August 1942, had no effect on the way the Allies conducted the war. However, since that time the WJC has claimed to be the diplomatic representative of Jewish people outside Israel, diaspora Jewry. Many of its member organisations, including the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, still justify their loyalty to this legendary association with such a great, tragic history.

At the end of 2000 the Clintons’ term of office finished. And with it this relaxed mixture of frivolity and high morals, most appropriately expressed by the ‘excusing’ of the President for his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. When his wife once asked her Bill why he had done it, he is reported to have said: ‘Simply because I could.’

‘Simply because I could’! The restitution seekers Singer and Co. did not have to say much more to justify their activities. After a few years on maximum moralistic look-out and with access to the world’s media, they stepped back into the cabal-like inner life of their associations, foundations and chambers. With all their public good they had not made any personal material gain. And they did not need to concern themselves with plans for a future after restitution. They basked in their great past successes, and the forces which had become superfluous imploded in intrigues and internal struggles which had become more and more passionate before the restitution campaign diverted them for a few years.

There was still one man at the centre of the WJC’s furious internal disputes: Israel Singer. The current high point in the association’s cabal-riven history is the investigation by the New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who also has oversight of endowments. This was inevitable at the end of 2004 when the row which was obvious to the readers of the New York Times could no longer be concealed by the Jewish newspapers of New York and Israel. It was office workers of the WJC itself, who in the summer of the same year had publicised a 1.2 million dollar transaction through a Geneva account which they could not understand. The bank involved was UBS, Singer’s favourite target in March 1998, when he and Bronfman threatened Switzerland with ‘total war’.

The New York rabbi authorised the dubious payment personally. And the account credited was that of a well-proven fellow combatant from the hot days of the campaign against the Swiss financial community, Zvi Barak, a businessman and official of the Jewish Agency, against whom investigations relating to questionable restitution transactions are also pending in Israel. And if that was not enough: Singer and his family are now also coming under suspicion in Israel. There is a lawsuit against the board members of a foundation close to the WJC, including his son Eli Singer. This also concerns the use of non-profit-making money. And research for this article has revealed that Israel Singer uses the title of doctor without such a title ever having been awarded to him. This is an offence in American law, as confirmed by a US attorney.

The guilt and atonement party

What has happened to the conquering heroes with their unimpeachable Jewishness under the slanting cap who the Swiss financial world will always remember for the fact that it did not take any criminal activity to relieve their highly insured major banks of more than two billion dollars? It was just ‘a few guys and a fax machine’, as they said in New York. Rise or fall – what happened to the irresistible Israel Singer?

It starts with a victory celebration in the capital of the world, on 11 September 2000 of all days, at that time not yet called 9/11. The assembled Bronfman dynasty invite their top-ranking allies to join them at the New York Nobel Hotel ‘Pierre’. Everyone comes, the ‘Partners in History’, as they are called in the invitation. From the German Foreign Minister, Swiss bankers, Israeli ministers, anyone who has acquired a name and position during the glorious restitution movement of the Nineties, to the American President and his wife Hillary. They all celebrate as befitting their moral economy, either as debtors providing atonement on behalf of the culprits or as creditors seeking atonement on behalf of the victims. Together they have accounted for the inherited debt from Europe’s darkest times and have thrown the burden of the past from their shoulders, dollar for dollar...

It should be the high point in the trophy-rich saga of Edgar Miles Bronfman’s World Jewish Congress. The whole clan is there: brothers, sons, sisters – and of course the family rabbi and protégé Israel Singer. He provides this gathering of personalities involved in world history with a genuine Jewish aura. He has come up with a good idea especially for this illustrious occasion, an idea intended to show him in a good light and gain attention. All funds left over from the first stage of restitution should go into a new ‘Foundation for the Jewish People’. There were huge amounts of excess funds from restitution as a result of the morally inflated settlements and agreements, that was well known. But what appeared to be part of the solution now started to become a ‘problem’ and a scandal. But that is another story which is waiting to be told. WJC President Bronfman has received a letter from Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel, in September 2000. He now shows this. Through Bronfman Israel is floating the idea ‘of taking the opportunity in our mutual interest of claiming the restitution money’. So it is hoped at 501 Madison Avenue that there is enough material for the press at least to report on the occasion.

Of course it is known that neither the WJC nor the state of Israel actually has any real claim to this surplus money which may become available in the foreseeable future. In actual fact the well-off rabbi and his WJC are not at all concerned about the money for themselves. Rabbi Singer knows that other hands will be used for distributing the money than for collecting it. He is only concerned about the highest representative dignities. For him the notional seizing of the restitution dividends is a noble gesture, signifying his claim to leadership in world Jewish matters. He must be one of the executives if they are to deal with Jewish questions of global significance.

He is looking forward to the time after Bronfman Sr., years in which he himself will be the WJC President. And President of the Claims Conference too, like the great Nahum Goldmann once was.

Outside the Nobel Hotel ‘Pierre’ a few embittered Holocaust survivors are demonstrating against the arrogant proposal of 501 Madison Avenue. But the New York and world press no longer care about this World Jewish Congress, and the row about the leftover restitution money is now just some disreputable squabbling that a handful of judicial functionaries are happy to fight over for the rest of their days. In the rest of the world a new scenario had developed. Clinton's moralistic campaigns have now been forgotten. After 9/11 America wants George W. Bush’s righteous war of good against evil. Moralising of the economy is in the past. The USA is now set on marshalling morality.

A plan becomes an obsession

Meanwhile Singer collects further titles along his presidential way. No-one can quantify his considerable collection of advisory titles, memberships of boards and committees, from chairman of the advisory board of the Israeli Yad Vashem Museum to the Claims Conference, which elects him as president in the spring of 2002. In June 2001 he becomes president of the IJCIC, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations. Not forgetting the historians’ committee of the Principality of Liechtenstein. Even this prince needs a world Jewish label for the final report on the dark times. And in New York President Bronfman Sr. tells everyone who has ears that he would like his rabbi to be his successor.

In Israel however, and Singer would come to feel this later, there was a rich man who wanted to make more out of the WJC. He was born into a Jewish orthodox family of diamond traders in Antwerp in 1934. With the outbreak of the Second World War they fled to Australia. Here, in Melbourne in the mid-Sixties, the diamond trader became a partner in a small travel agency. Within a few years he turned Jetset Tours into a group of companies with subsidiaries in Asia, the USA and Europe. Isi Leibler comes to the fore at the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. He secures the contract to make all the travel arrangements for the Australian delegation. So he travels to and fro between Melbourne and Moscow and becomes one of the few Jewish activists to maintain regular contact with Jewish communities and personalities in Russia. With all his energy he takes up the lot of those Jewish dissidents fighting for freedom to express their religion and culture, including the right to emigrate to the Holy Land. He carries out unofficial secret negotiations on behalf of Israel.

The WJC also has the Soviet Jews on its agenda at this time. When in 1981 Bronfman bought the label and started to fly to Moscow with Singer in the Seagram’s company aircraft and commendably began to be welcomed there, the efforts gained a controversial prominence. But the quieter efforts of Isi Leibler, who had meanwhile become involved in the management of the association, together with his international label, achieved concrete results. Many a one-time Soviet dissident now living in Israel is enduringly grateful to him for that.

In 1995, now over 60, he retired from active business life and emigrated to Jerusalem. In his luggage he had assets worth millions, together with one of the richest libraries of Judaica and the gigantic archive of a restless activist. Passion for the Jewish state burnt in his heart. In his head a plan grew into an obsession. In the wake of the Oslo Peace Process for the Near East which he welcomed enthusiastically he wanted to create a movement entirely devoted to Israel’s interests from the Zionist movements scattered all over the world. This movement would then do everything which, ‘for diplomatic reason a state’ cannot do. The clearer it became that the Oslo dove of peace would not find dry ground, the more urgent Leibler’s ‘Israel first’ project became for him and he began to ask himself whether the worn out WJC might be ripe for forging into a powerful instrument in Israel’s political arsenal: to become a real organisation with democratic committees, proper budgets and a genuine agenda. For this he was even prepared to use his own assets, for Leibler was the kind of businessman who wants to make something happen with his money. He was also afraid of getting bored. And he knew that his concept of a World Jewish Congress with Israel at the centre was not compatible with the real WJC of 501 Madison Avenue, the label in the Bronfman dynasty portfolio.

At the start of the millennium not only was the force with Bush in the USA, but also with Sharon in Israel. His stamping in front of the Al Aksa mosque in September 2000 signalled the start of a new wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Positive Israeli nationalism was a good base for Leibler’s programme. But in order to even consider implementing his agenda in the WJC there had to be democratic and financial reforms of the association. In the spring of 2001, as the chairman of the governing board, he stated in a memorandum: ‘The time has come to introduce democratic processes to ensure that we are accountable to our members and that we obey the statutes which in the past have been systematically violated.’

Singer in New York could not imagine a clearer announcement. It was obvious that this was a man who was battling for a genuine World Jewish Congress. With him and Bronfman this could not happen. Their WJC was not a fighting unit, but a dialogue-based US label. And he wanted it to stay that way. It was now a case of gaining time until Bronfman could take his well deserved retirement. Meanwhile Singer would give up his position as the salaried General Secretary and become more presidential with the higher title of Chairman. There was a temporary compromise with Leibler. A committee was formed to examine the proposals for improving internal democracy.

However, Isi Leibler believed that one factor in particular gave his reforming efforts strong momentum. He had discovered that for some time the WJC had not been financed solely from Bronfman’s assets, but had implemented a fundraising system which contributed every year to the day-to-day running of its affairs. The WJC had therefore changed from being an organisation under patronage into a non-profit-making financial company and as such was subject to the attention of the US tax and regulatory authorities.

The frequent flier programme

In the end the question of Bronfman’s succession was resolved before it was really aired. The patron did not actually retire, but postponed this next step for an indefinite period. This meant that for the time being Singer became Chairman, an honorary position which he took over from Isi Leibler while he got himself elected Chairman of the Board. But even as Chairman Singer was still able to clock up as many air miles with trips around the world as he did when General Secretary. So, after the fuss had died down, everything remained as before.

It was not until August 2003 that Isi Leibler had an opportunity to attack the management duo of Bronfman and Singer. Bronfman had written a letter to President Bush in which he asked him indirectly to urge Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon to abandon the border wall which was to separate Israel and the Palestinians, and to hand over further settlement activities in the Palestinian regions occupied by Israel. Bronfman, who in particularly conciliatory moments had even conceded that Palestinian terror attacks on settlements were 'in some way understandable', wanted to advance the international peace plan, the ‘Road Map’. In an open letter in the Jerusalem Post Isi Leibler urged President Bronfman to retire: ‘We have enough enemies without someone with the title of President of the WJC undermining the security interests of the state of Israel.’ In an E-mail Edgar Bronfman Sr. referred to his adversary as a ‘skunk’, called the dispute with him a ‘pissing match’, and said he pitied Leibler’s wife for having to share her life with such a person.

Once more an agreement was reached, in which the antagonists pledged to join forces to work on the reforms to the WJC. However, in the late summer of 2004, the affair of the Geneva bank account became public. When this blew open the small cracks visible in the internal Jewish publications and finally found its way into the New York Times, the New York attorney general’s office had to start an investigation which at first was cursory, then became more and more thorough.

Isi Leibler’s battle in the WJC now had to be stopped. Delegates were flown in from all corners of the world for the general assembly in Brussels in January 2005. They prevented Leibler from speaking by shouting him down and in the end voted the old warrior out of the association.

Now the ranks were closed and Singer gained a watchdog in the form of the well-known homosexual lobbyist Stephen Herbits, a one-time executive of Bronfman’s Seagram group who then went on to work with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Herbits ensured that the clearing up which was urgently needed was started without his president Bronfman being damaged.

One thing was clear and would remain true as long as Bronfman and his dynasty continued to have the WJC in their portfolio: no-one at 501 Madison Avenue has anything to say apart from the founder of the WJC.

And after more than a year of investigation by the New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, since last week it is official*:

– Israel Singer smuggled 1.2 million dollars for his pension past all committees and oversight by the WJC.

– He was therefore in breach of his obligation of executive care and contravened the corresponding laws.

– He used hundreds of thousands of dollars of donated funds for his own private purposes and has to repay over 300,000 dollars.

– From now on he must not have any administrative, financial or other responsibility for the WJC.

– In the coming years he will only be able to pursue his business under the strictest conditions with close supervision by the attorney general’s office, and his repayments must be approved by the attorney general’s office.

– Singer’s Jewish association, the WJC, must carry out all the reforms demanded for years by Isi Leibler.

Anyone requiring more findings than those listed in the attorney general’s report should go through the civil law route. Singer will not be charged by the state for his contraventions so long as he and 501 Madison Avenue comply with the strict conditions of the settlement with the attorney general.

Now the media star of the restitution seekers is providing his own restitution. He refuses to talk to the authors. At the WJC’s expense he uses expensive lawyers to threaten us with injunctions at the Zurich district court, and with lawsuits. Otherwise, in his newly acquired time since being free of any administrative responsibility, he is collecting more and more honorary sinecures. No dirt has stuck to him. In the end no people can defend themselves against someone who presumes to represent them without being elected, especially if this representative has copious funds available to him.

As long as bankers, politicians, diplomats and other eminences need just one Jew to stand for his whole people, they will find the best possible representative in Israel Singer. One who commemorates the annihilated Jews and swears to the future of their successors will always be welcome. The struggle and all the proceedings end with all responsibility being taken away from the restitution seeker. Israel Singer was created for higher things and is therefore to be released from all obligations.

However, since Singer has to remain a chairman in the WJC, an advisory committee which he is allowed to chair, the Policy Council, was created for him. Thus freed, he drifts away in a balloon. While the people on the ground, undaunted, look up to heaven, their hands over their eyes, calling: ‘Look there, how our exalted and grand rabbi flies away!’

But no-one needs to stay there any longer.

*Report by the New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer to the World Jewish Congress and Israel Singer: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2006/jan/WJC%20AOD%2001-31-2006.pdf

Original article can be found at http://www.weltwoche.ch/artikel/?AssetID=13191&CategoryID=82