On the recordDecember 15, 2010
I have sought recognition to urge my colleagues to support and take up next Congress the bill I just introduced, the Restoration of Legal Rights for Claimants Under Holocaust-Era Insurance Policies. The bill would restore the right of Holocaust survivors and their descendants--many of them United States citizens--to maintain lawsuits in our courts to recover unpaid proceeds under Holocaust-era life insurance policies. Recent decisions of the federal courts about which I have spoken at length in prior floor statements and confirmation hearings have denied survivors and their descendants that right. The insurance policies at issue were issued to millions of European Jews before World War II. During the Nazi era, European insurers largely escaped their obligations under the policies--sometimes by participating with the Nazis in what one Supreme Court Justice has characterized as ``larcenous takings of gigantic proportions.'' In the aftermath of World War II, insurers dishonored the policies for one shameful reason or another. The most shameful of them was that a claimant could not produce a death certificate of a deceased insured who had been murdered in a Nazi death camp.
