The plan ran to 900 pages, took Judah Gribetz a year and a half to write, and ended up moving nearly $1.288 billion to more than 458,400 people. Gribetz, the lawyer who built it, died at home in Queens, New York, on June 26. He was 97.
The New York Times reported his death first. His son, Sidney Gribetz, confirmed it afterward.
Special master for the Swiss bank settlement
In 1999 a federal judge appointed Gribetz special master and gave him a specific job: work out how to divide the $1.25 billion that Swiss banks had agreed to pay to settle a class-action lawsuit. The suit accused the banks of inflicting further harm on victims of Nazi persecution.
The claimants numbered about half a million. Some had put money in Swiss banks to keep it from the Nazis. Others were enslaved laborers for German companies, or people whose looted property had been sold off through Swiss institutions. Romani people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people and gay people were covered by the claim too.
Gribetz’s plan set aside up to $800 million for Holocaust survivors, with payments adjusted for inflation. The other $450 million went to former enslaved laborers and to people whose property had been plundered, through a range of programs.
“We tried to do as transparent and as far-reaching a solution as possible,” he told the Times. The work had been arduous, he said, but “very satisfying.”
The New York City budget crisis
Earlier, in 1975, Gribetz was a lawyer and counsel to Hugh L. Carey, New York’s 51st governor. The city was heading toward financial disaster, with a deficit of around $2.6 billion, according to the Times.
He was one of Carey’s chief negotiators in talks with Mayor Abraham D. Beame, and the two sides did not get along. Richard R. Shinn, an insurance industry executive with a prominent role in the negotiations, credited Gribetz with a “conciliatory and helpful role offstage.” Shinn added: “He was important in bringing those guys together, keeping them each informed and aware of how the other one felt.”
Gribetz went back to private practice in 1979 and stayed active in civic affairs. He served as president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. With Edward L. Greenstein and Regina Stein, he also wrote “The Timetables of Jewish History,” published in 1993.
The Times described him as known for long hours and for a “propensity for waxing loud, forceful and dramatic.” Beame put it his own way: “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.”
Early life
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. Judah went to Boys High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then earned bachelor’s and law degrees from Columbia University and a master’s from New York University. He served in the Navy before entering private practice.
He married Jessica Shapiro in 1952. She survives him, along with a son, two daughters, a brother, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
