$1.25 Billion Holocaust Survivors Settlement With Swiss Banks

For decades after World War II, Swiss financial institutions held billions of dollars deposited by Jewish families who perished in the Holocaust or were forced to flee Nazi Europe. The banks stonewalled surviving family members seeking to reclaim those assets, denying the existence of accounts and invoking strict secrecy laws. Declassified documents released in the mid-1990s gave lawyers their first real foothold to challenge this conduct in a U.S. court.

In 1996, a consolidated class action was filed in the Eastern District of New York against Credit Suisse, Union Bank of Switzerland, and Swiss Bank Corporation. Attorneys argued that the banks' U.S. branches provided jurisdiction and that the statute of limitations should be tolled because the institutions had actively concealed the accounts from depositors' heirs. The District Court appointed an executive committee of ten plaintiffs' lawyers to manage the worldwide litigation, and Cohen & Malad was named to that committee, with both Irwin Levin and Richard Shevitz representing the firm.

Levin had been among the first American attorneys to investigate the Swiss bank accounts issue, researching the claims of Holocaust survivors in the Indianapolis area and writing about the subject before litigation was even filed. Shevitz, who had grown up around Holocaust survivors in Indianapolis, joined forces with East Coast counsel already pursuing the case. Over four years, the team traveled between New York, Washington, Germany, Israel, and Switzerland to build the evidentiary record.

The settlement was reached in August 1998 at a private dinner at Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn, with Chief Judge Edward Korman presiding over the negotiations and announcing the $1.25 billion figure. The court formally approved the settlement in 2000. Funds were distributed across five classes of claimants based on the nature of their losses, including dormant accounts, looted assets, and slave-labor claims. Payouts to individual recipients ranged from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on documented losses.

By the time distributions were complete, approximately 458,000 claimants had received payments, and remaining unclaimed funds went to Holocaust survivor organizations. Levin described the case as the most personally rewarding of his career, noting that the team settled when it did in part because the average Holocaust survivor was 80 years old and the class was shrinking by roughly one percent each month.