Basic Moral Standards Set Aside

"Please, your honour, don't let me live with the guilt of not being able to be by [my mother's] side if, God forbid, something happens."
"The horrors of the Holocaust are difficult to think about, and I can't even imagine how people made it through the suffering and pain, but they did. These people deserve some kind of restitution for that.
"I legitimately thought I was helping them get [their claim settled]. The situation I am in today still does not make sense to me."
"The last two years have been similar to incarceration for me. I didn't want to see or talk to anyone because of shame and embarrassment and rarely left home other than to see my mother and other relatives."
Luba Kramrish, Toronto

"If ever there was a cause that you would hope and expect would be immune from base greed and criminal fraud, it would be the Claims Conference, which every day assists thousands of poor and elderly survivors of the Nazi genocide."
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara

Luba Kramrish was a bit player. She observed how the strange gaming of German-funded restitution for Holocaust survivors was playing out. She had herself succumbed to paying to have her mother's claim moved forward. Applying for assistance on behalf of her mother her gullibility was consumed by a widespread scheme, a conspiracy launched by employees whose work it was to examine claims and distribute the funding, and who decided among themselves to take their own generously entitled cut.

They began to recruit false applicants, they became document forgers, they took great pains to ensure that the millions of dollars representing German guilt for unspeakable atrocities mounted against Jews, were used to enrich themselves through a series of fraudulent devices. When Luba Kramrish originally contacted the New York office distributing the funds she spoke with a corrupted caseworker, Faina Davidson, who suggested she would accept $2,000 from Luba Kramish for expediting her mother's claim.

When, within the community of Russian-born Holocaust survivors, the story of how Luba Kramish managed to have her mother's (legitimate) claim brought forward and processed expeditiously was spread, others asked Ms. Kramrish for her assistance in promoting their own claims. She accepted, she said, a $500 fee for connecting anxious Holocaust claimants in her community with the corrupted case workers. The case against her in the Manhattan court is that she took up to $1,500 as a fee for submitting 20 to 25 false claims.

The disgraceful moral wasteland that she had entered cannot have seemed excusable to Luba Kramrish. She knew what it was for people to have suffered the absolute dread of having been targeted for death, the stark fear, misery and inhumane conditions in which they were forced to survive against all hope. Yet she accepted that the venality she saw in others might be useful to herself, to enhancing her own financial situation. Her reaction hadn't been how reprehensible and repugnant such greed was, but how she might herself profit from emulating what others had done.

"The Kramrish family", she said, pleading for mercy, "does not live a lavish lifestyle as you might expect of someone convicted of white collar crime. I have never had any intention of stealing anything from anyone." What she had not intended she still managed to perform, to become involved in a disgraceful scheme, to become a cog in the machinery that defrauded a not-for-profit agency providing assistance to elderly victims of Nazi persecution. In fact those fraudulent claims administered by corrupt claimants sucked $57-million from the international victims' funds.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany administers several programs serving to process and handle reparation payments funded by the government of Germany. Luba Kramrish took on legitimate claimants who became convinced that through her their claims would stand a better chance of being accepted. And she saw nothing amiss in charging them handsomely for adroitly handling their claims by sending them directly to the caseworkers whom she knew were indulging in a criminally indefensible scheme to enrich themselves.

Those were people, themselves of Jewish origin, who placed false claims of unscrupulous people seeking to advantage themselves, some of whom were never touched by the Holocaust, even people who were not even born at the time, and others who had at no time lived in wartime Europe. Luba Kramrish was permitted to return to Toronto on bail conditions temporarily to make provisions for care to be given to her 93-year-old bedridden mother, living in a nursing home.

But 58-year-old Ms. Kramrish must pay the penalty for having succumbed to the allure that seemed so irresistible to her that her moral antennae were set aside in the interests of benefiting herself from a fund meant to ease the life of the elderly and the poor with memories that would forever haunt them albeit in the few years left to them. She must return to the United States to surrender herself to the 37 months behind bars that constitute her sentence reflecting her predatory lapse in moral judgement.

RICK EGLINTON / TORONTO STAR

Luba Kramrish's lawyer, David Rose, leaves her north Toronto home on Thursday. Kramrish is accused of being part of a massive fraud against a German fund meant to compensate Jewish Holocaust survivors.