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The boss was Edgar Bronfman. Heir to the Seagram spirits business, he had devoted his early years to building the company founded by his father into a multibillion-dollar empire. Only when his ardently Zionist father died in 1971 did Edgar rediscover his faith. For the past 20 years, he has expended much of his formidable energy and much of his time on the activities of the World Jewish Congress. Bronfman first transformed the relatively passive fund-raising charity into a prime mover of Jewish causes. He has personally bankrolled much of the organization's work and used his stature to force recognition of Jewish rights as he sees them. Bronfman championed the campaign to make the former Soviet Union permit Russian Jews to emigrate, and he almost single-handedly ended the career of Kurt Waldheim, once U.N. Secretary-General, then President of Austria, for alleged war crimes. "Part of my life and part of the things that I want out of life," he says, "is to be a Jewish leader."
What turned this courtly, resolute advocate into the point man for reclaiming Jewish assets from Switzerland was a chair--or, more precisely, the lack of a chair. On Sept. 12, 1995, Bronfman went with Singer to a meeting in Bern. They wanted to ask the Swiss Bankers Association to investigate the dormant accounts of Holocaust victims. Without offering their visitors a seat, the bankers began to dictate their terms. They proposed turning over $32 million discovered in 774 Jewish accounts since the war and suggested that that would close the matter for good. "I don't think it occurred to them that there was not a chair," recalls Bronfman. "From my viewpoint, you do not treat people that way."
That incivility, especially from a country he considered honorable and sophisticated, helped spur Bronfman into a relentless campaign. "They had bought off groups before, and this was just a bigger bribe," he says. "I realized what they really wanted us to do was to take the money and run."
Instead Bronfman went to Washington and had lunch with New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato. The Republican from Long Island was down in the polls back home, under fire for his partisan assaults on President Clinton's ethics, desperate for an issue that would refurbish his image. Bronfman brought him a heaven-sent gift certain to appeal to his large bloc of Jewish voters. When Bronfman told him about the Swiss banks' stalling, D'Amato offered public hearings by his Senate banking committee. With the in-your-face D'Amato aboard, the war was about to begin in earnest.
Two weeks ago, the Swiss capitulated. A little. First the major banks announced they would create a $70 million humanitarian fund for the remaining survivors of the Holocaust and families of victims. Then the Swiss government said it would oversee the fund, but would not commit any public money until its investigation, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, had been completed.
The American-led crusade for financial restitution and a fresh reading of history has by no means reached its end. In April, Under Secretary for International Trade Stuart Eizenstat will unveil a potentially explosive examination of American wartime records, including the controversial U.S. role in tracing Nazi assets.