Appointment of Monitor Adds Teeth to Fight Against Anti-Semitism

The U.S. State Department just added a set of teeth to its fledgling office monitoring anti-Semitism.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday named Gregg Rickman, a dogged investigator who has tracked the Swiss banks’ role in the Holocaust, as the first special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism around the world. Jewish leaders unanimously agreed that the appointment would push the office monitoring anti-Semitism, in existence barely 18 months, to the department’s front burner.

“It creates a strong point person that will be able to coordinate all the different parts of our government that deal with anti-Semitism,” said Mark Levin, executive director of NCSJ, a group that advocates for Jews in the former Soviet Union and that lobbied for the position.

“Without continued U.S. leadership,” he added, “I’m not sure how much attention will be paid by our friends in Europe and elsewhere to anti-Semitism.”

Congressional legislation sponsored by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) created the office in late 2004 over the objection of State Department mandarins, who said it would just create an extra layer of bureaucracy, and was unnecessary because the issue already was being addressed in the department’s human-rights monitoring.

The legislation was created amid the most recent intifada, when anti-Semitism intensified in Europe and the Middle East.

Swiss Bank Foe

So far the office, under the direction of Edward O’Donnell, special envoy for Holocaust issues, has produced just one report, in January 2005.

Insiders said that O’Donnell was already overworked in his capacity encouraging the rightful distribution of Holocaust assets, and the office sorely needed its own “boss.”

Rickman’s principal qualification for the job is his stint as a director on the Senate Banking Committee in the mid-1990s under the chairmanship of former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.), when it uncovered Swiss banks’ role in hiding Nazi loot and keeping Jewish survivors from accessing their pre-Holocaust accounts. Rickman, who is Jewish, wrote an account of the investigation called Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls.

“Gregg Rickman, working with Sen. D’Amato, is almost single-handedly the one who uncovered the corruption and the immorality of the Swiss banks,” said William Daroff, vice president for public policy of the United Jewish Communities, the umbrella body of North American Jewish federations, and director of its Washington office.

Together with NCSJ, Daroff led the effort for legislation creating the anti-Semitism office when he was congressional liaison for the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Rickman, who was also staff director for former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), succeeded Daroff at the RJC in 2004. The group reveled in the appointment of one of its own.

Rickman, 42, recently returned to the Hill, where he has directed the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee investigating the “oil for food” scandal implicating U.N. officials and others in receiving kickbacks from Saddam Hussein during the years Iraq was under sanction.

That kind of doggedness will serve him well in his new capacity, according to representatives of groups that liaise between Washington and small, vulnerable Jewish communities overseas.

“Putting someone in there who has the know-how and connections to do the job right at least gives the issue a fair shot,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, who directs Chabad-Lubavitch in Washington.

Some Jewish groups had advocated for a scholar and someone with a less partisan background, but Rickman was the better choice, stated Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.

“You don’t need a scholar,” he said, “you need a pragmatic civil servant who will be there, be articulate and be a liaison.”