Cohen and Wolf Hosts Legal Clinic for 25 Holocaust Survivors to File for Long Overdue Reparations  

Bridgeport, CT, September 11, 2008-Attorneys from Cohen and Wolf will offer pro bono legal assistance to more than two dozen southern Connecticut residents who performed work in European Ghettos and survived the Holocaust. The lawyers will help the survivors file applications to claim reparations from the German government at a free legal clinic hosted at Cohen and Wolf's Bridgeport office (1115 Broad Street) Sunday, September 14 beginning @ 9:00 a.m.

The lawyers will help the survivors navigate a complicated and, at times, personally painful application that covers everything from where the applicants lived during their time of persecution to providing a synopsis of the work they performed while living in a German controlled ghetto. Successful applicants can expect to receive about $3000 in compensation from Germany. Virtually all the applicants say they are not doing this for the money itself, but rather for a sense of accountability by Germany for all the Nazis took from their lives.

The 14 Cohen and Wolf attorneys participating in the clinic include Managing Partner Irv Kern and partners Jonathan Bowman, Greta Solomon and Vincent Marino. Associates Jesse Langer and Rachel Pencu are coordinating the project in conjunction with Jewish Family Services of Greater Bridgeport. Aetna Life, based in Hartford, is providing pro bono legal help as well.

Each of the 25 applicants has a poignant personal story about how they lost everything from their jobs to their possessions to their families during the Holocaust. Yet each of these courageous individuals managed to survive and rebuild his/her life here in Connecticut. The reparation program will give the survivors an opportunity to receive some compensation, even if it comes far too many years later than it should have.

The reparations are available through the Ghetto Labor Act, which was passed in 2002 to compensate "voluntary laborers," many of them Jewish, who toiled in German-controlled ghettos both before and during World War II.

The ghettos were compulsory "Jewish Quarters" where all Jews from the city and surrounding areas where forced to reside in a small, poor and concealed section. The ghettos were notorious for overcrowding, malnutrition, starvation, disease and violence perpetrated by the Nazis. When the ghettos were liquidated, the residents were sent to forced-labor and/or concentration camps.

Among the survivors who will attend the free legal clinic on Sunday are:

• Sari Baron, now of Bridgeport but originally from Hungary, who, after her time in a Ghetto performing voluntary labor,, also spent hard time at Auschwitz and was forced to a working camp to make bombs as a teenager. Ms. Baron has a heroic story of how she escaped death after a bomb fell on her foot. She was unable to walk and was almost left behind during the liberation. Ms. Baron later returned to the Buchenwald camp to look for her father. She did not find him, but in a quirk of fate did meet the man she would soon marry and move to the U.S. with in 1949.

• Anita Schorr, Westport resident and Czechoslovakian native, who, after her time in a Ghetto, where she performed voluntary labor, she was sent to Auschwitz before she even turned 15 and was forced to work as a slave laborer. Ms. Schorr was forced to hard labor even though her father was a high officer in the Czechoslovak Army. After the war, she moved to Israel where she became one of the first women in the Hagannah, an underground defense organization, at the time of Israeli independence. She came to the United States in 1959.

Cohen and Wolf, for more than half a century, has represented business and individual clients in matters involving litigation, corporate and securities law, real estate, land use, tax, employment and labor, municipal law, personal injury, family law, estate planning, elder law and asset protection planning. The firm's team of nearly 50 experienced lawyers is based in its four Connecticut offices in Bridgeport, Danbury, Orange and Westport. For more information please visit http://www.cohenandwolf.com/.