Judah Gribetz, top aide to former New York governor Hugh L. Carey and the mind behind a complex plan that distributed more than a billion dollars in restitution to half a million Holocaust survivors, died in his home on June 26 in Queens, New York, at the age of 97, the New York Times initially reported earlier this week.
His son, Sidney Gribetz, later confirmed his death, the NYT said.
Gribetz was born in Brooklyn on April 1, 1929, to Abraham and Ida (Heller) Gribetz. His father became executive director of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, which helped needy immigrants, in 1938.
He attended Boys High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, later earning bachelor’s and law degrees from Columbia University and a master’s degree from New York University. He went on to serve in the Navy, and later entered a private law practice.
He married Jessica Shapiro in 1952, who survives him, as well as two sons, two daughters, a brother, four grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, added the report.
Gribetz was a lawyer and counsel to New York’s 51st governor in 1975, a time in which New York City was heading towards financial disaster, with a deficit of around $2.6 billion, according to the report.
He was also one of Governor Carey’s chief negotiators during talks with the city’s mayor, Abraham D. Beame, with whom he had a rocky relationship at the time. He is credited with playing a “conciliatory and helpful role offstage” by Richard R. Shinn, an insurance industry executive who also had a prominent role in the negotiations, the report said.
“He was important in bringing those guys together, keeping them each informed and aware of how the other one felt,” Shinn added.
Gribetz returned to private law practice in 1979, where he remained active in civic affairs, the NYT said.
He was also president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and author of the book “The Timetables of Jewish History: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in Jewish History” (1993), which he wrote alongside Edward L. Greenstein and Regina Stein, according to the report.
The report explained that Gribetz was appointed by a federal judge in 1999 as a special master charged with creating a plan to distribute $1.25 billion that Swiss banks had agreed to pay to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused them of having inflicted further harm on targets of Nazi execution.
The half a million claimants included people who had deposited money in the banks to safeguard it from the Nazis, enslaved laborers for German companies, and people whose Nazi-looted property was disposed of through Swiss institutions.
Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses, Disabled, and LGBT Holocaust victims also included in claim
Members of the Romani community, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and gay people were also included in the claim.
It took Gribetz a year and a half to come up with a 900-page plan that allocated up to $800 million for Holocaust survivors, with their payments adjusted for inflation. The remaining $450 million included former enslaved laborers and those whose property had been plundered during the war, who would be aided through various programs, said the report.
According to the NYT, nearly $1.288 billion was distributed to more than 458,400 claimants.
“We tried to do as transparent and as far-reaching a solution as possible,” Gribetz had told the NYT, adding that the plan had been arduous but “very satisfying.”
Gribetz was known for working long hours for his “propensity for waxing loud, forceful and dramatic,” said the NYT.
Beame told the Times: “He’s never roared at me, but I’ve heard him make himself known. But everybody who knows him knows that’s just an outward facade: Down deep, he’s very easygoing and pleasant.”