Feigina (née Idelson) Gerta (Herta) (25 November 1928, Riga) — lawyer, public figure.
Gerta Feigina was born and raised in Riga in the family of a successful engineer and studied at the Ezra Gymnasium. On 14 June 1941, her parents and sister were deported to Siberia, where her father died in 1943. Twelve-year-old Herta managed to evade the NKVD, and on 28 June 1941 she left with her aunt’s family in evacuation to Central Asia.
She returned to Riga in December 1944. She did not attend school from 1941 to 1946; in 1947 she began studying in the 10th grade of an evening school. After graduating, she enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the Latvian State University. However, due to the deportation of her parents in the summer of 1949, she had to withdraw her documents from the university.
She later enrolled in the evening and then correspondence departments of Leningrad University and completed her legal education at Vilnius University in 1956.
She worked as a lawyer in the Arkhangelsk region, then as a legal adviser in Vilnius until 1959. From 1959 she worked in Riga as a legal adviser for the furniture company “Riga.” In 1965–1971 she worked in Kaliningrad as head of the legal department of “Selkhoztekhnika,” after which she returned to Riga and worked as a cleaner at the “Dzintars” factory — in order to obtain the required employment certificate to apply for emigration.
She emigrated with her family to Israel in the summer of 1973. In 1975 she moved to Germany, and in 1976 emigrated to the United States.
In New York, after completing courses, she worked briefly as an accountant, and then was employed by New York Association of New Americans, where she was responsible for receiving immigrants.
From January 1981 until early 1999 (and effectively until her full retirement in 2003), Gerta Feigina served as director of the Hardship Fund of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
This institution had been established after the war as part of the system for distributing reparations from the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1980, following an agreement between the Claims Conference and the German government, its functions were expanded to include one-time payments, and from 1992 onward, monthly compensation to Jewish victims of Nazism living in North and South America, Africa, and Australia.
The organization of the main office in New York and its branches worldwide, numerous trips to these countries, the creation of a comprehensive registry of ghettos and concentration camps, cooperation with archives in Germany and former occupied territories, the development of criteria for determining eligibility for compensation, preparation of documentation first for Western countries and from 1997 also for Eastern Europe, and thousands of personal meetings with survivors in the most complex cases — all of this work was established under her leadership.
Her success was due not only to her perfect command of Russian, German, English, Latvian, and Yiddish, but also to her exceptional ability to work with people and her deep legal expertise. During her years at the Claims Conference, her signature appeared on compensation documents for more than 200,000 former prisoners.
From May 2002 to 2007, she served as Honorary Consul of Latvia in New York.
In 1978, she became a member of the council of the Jewish Survivors of Latvia.
Works:
The Lived Experience («Прожитое»). Riga, 2006. 164 p.