Outcry over war seizures of Jewish property

AN outcry over the seizure of Jewish property in Paris during the second World War has forced municipal authorities to freeze sales of city owned property pending an investigation.

The Mayor of Paris, Mr Jea Tiberi, announced the decision a city council meeting last week.

"We must speak clearly and without ambiguity," he told the 163 city councillors. "There was dispossession of Jews. It is unacceptable, scandalous, ignoble."

The origins of the city's private property portfolio became an issue when a book, Private Domain, by the French journalist Brigitte Vital Durand, was published in late October.

Ms Vital Durand denounced the "administrative pogrom" under which French authorities; expropriated Jewish property between 1941 and 1944 under German occupation. Many of these buildings, she says, are still in the city's possession.

The exact amount of confiscated Jewish property is not known.

In 1940, 25,000 people lived in the part of the Jewish Marais district known as the Pletzl. Five years later, only 5,000 of them were left. The city of Paris today owns 150 buildings in this tiny quarter - nearly half, of the city's portfolio of 318, buildings. The property portfolio earns nearly £8 million in revenue annually.

France's treatment of its Jews during the second World War is one of the most shameful episodes in its history. It took 50 years before a French president officially acknowledged that the country shared responsibility, for the deportation and death in Nazi concentration camps of tens of thousands of French Jews.

French police organised round ups of Jews destined for death camps with little or no prompting from their Nazi occupiers.

Mr Tiberi's initial reaction to the publicity generated by Ms Vital Durand's book was defensive. "I wasn't people to stop demonising the city of Paris for commercial and political reasons," he declared. "The city of Paris certainly does not have to lush about its behaviour during.

But as more politicians and French Jewish leaders joined in demanding a thorough investigation and an immediate halt to real state sales Mr Tiberi adopted a more contrite tone.

One city councillor, Mr Lionel Finel, gave a moving first hand testimony at this week's meeting. Mr Finel, who is Jewish, fled his family's apartment in the Pletzl just before a police roundup of Jews in 1942. His father, who had already been incarcerated, died in Auschwitz the same year.

Mr Finel became a resistance here and is today Mr Tiberi's deputy in charge of water and sanitation for the city of Paris. When, Mr Finel, his mother and sister returned to their apartment after the war, they found a French family living in it. It took them two years to regain possession.

Most of the Jewish property now believed to be in the city's possession belonged to Jews who were murdered in the death camps.

Some may have been survived by heirs too young to have sought restitution after the war. There are 5,500 cardboard boxes in the French national archives detailing seizures of Jewish property.

The Paris city government now intends to search through these documents. If the property cannot be restored to legal heirs, it will probably be sold and the profits given to Jewish institutions.