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Friday December 8, 2000

File Holocaust-era claims, read memoirs on the Web

James Besser

Too often, we think of the World Wide Web solely as a medium designed for entertainment, and something a lot of people regard as entertainment -- shopping.

But the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims makes good use of the Web for much more serious purposes.

The object of the site: to help individuals who may have outstanding claims based on Holocaust-era insurance policies get the information they need, and if possible, file claims to recover at least some of the money owed them.

On the home page, click on a language -- English, for most of us, but Hebrew, Yiddish and 20 others are available -- to get to general information about the commission and about procedures for filing insurance claims.

For information about claims uncovered by the commission -- created two years ago by insurance organizations and companies, Jewish groups and the government of Israel -- go to the search box.

You'll need to enter the person's last name; any additional information you can provide, including information about the person's last-known residence and where the policy was purchased, can help narrow the search down.

If you have reason to believe you have a legitimate claim, you can download a complete claims packet -- including the forms you need to file and instructions.

A "links" page points visitors to other Web resources for those seeking Holocaust-era restitution, or searching for lost family members.

The site is all business--lean, direct, easy to use. Altogether, a valuable resource for anybody with a possible unclaimed policy in their past.

Check it out at www.icheic.org.

On a more personal level, ordinary people often have extraordinary stories to tell. And the Web -- which lets everybody be a publisher -- offers them a unique medium for telling their tales.

Case in point: the home page of Meyer Levin, a retired door-to-door salesman whose odyssey from czarist Russia to Philadelphia could serve as an archetype for the American Jewish experience.

For 20 years, Levin has been writing his memoirs, and the results are neatly and attractively packaged on this Web site.

Levin, who is 87 and now living in Phoenix, Ariz., sets the tone for the site with a brief letter to his grandchildren explaining the purposes of the memoir.

"I wish that my grandparents would have left me a word-picture of their younger years," he writes.

The presentation is straightforward. A brief section introduces visitors to Meyer and the outlines of his story. Then, there are a handful of choices.

Click on "The Stories" to read Levin's reminisces -- plainly but nicely written accounts of his experiences over the decades.

There's a touching tribute to his mother, and a poignant description of his family's decision to leave their home in Ukraine.

You can also read about his World War II experiences as a soldier in the U.S. Army.

A cute feature: Levin offers to translate modern English words into Yiddish. How do you say "Web site" in Yiddish? This site will give you the answer.

A small collection of Jewish jokes is fairly lame. There's also a Levin family genealogy and a very nice assortment of pictures from the family's scrapbook.

The Meyer Levin site is attractive and well designed -- marred only slightly by the annoying background music that beeps away at you on the home page.

More than anything else, it demonstrates how relatively simple Web programming allows salesmen from Philadelphia, as well as big-name machers, to tell their stories to the world. And sometimes, the salesmen's stories are every bit as interesting.

Check it out at www.geocities.com/meyerdotcom.

James D. Besser is a Washington-based correspondent who has been writing about Jewish Web sites since the early 1990s. His columns alternate with those of Mark Mietkiewicz. Besser can be reached at jbesser@his.com

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