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Gregory Schneider was appointed executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) in 2009. He joined the Claims Conference in 1995. Mr. Schneider has overseen the creation and implementation of several Claims Conference individual compensation payment programs for Jewish victims of Nazism. Chief among these was the Program for Former Slave and Forced Laborers, which paid $1.6 billion to 173,000 Holocaust survivors in 87 countries, the result of distributing and processing applications in eight languages, working with hundreds of local organizations worldwide that assisted applicants, and helping document tens of thousands of claims that otherwise would have been deemed ineligible. Mr. Schneider also oversaw the creation of Claims Conference programs to compensate victims of Nazi medical experiments, former refugees to Switzerland, survivors of the Nazi occupation of Budapest, and first-ever one-time payments to Nazi victims in the former Soviet Union. He has overseen negotiations with the German government that have substantially liberalized eligibility criteria for compensation programs, fundamentally altering their contours and enabling tens of thousands of additional victims to receive payments. Mr. Schneider guided the Claims Conference’s Institutional Allocations Program since its inception in 1995, facilitating its growth from $90 million allocated annually in 24 countries to the $400 million allocated for 2015 to benefit Nazi victims in 47 countries. He oversaw the preparation for negotiations with the German government that resulted in dramatic increases in its funding for homecare for Holocaust victims beginning in 2011. The growth of these allocations has enabled pioneering care for Nazi victims as they age and require more assistance. Mr. Schneider received his BA in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and his MA in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University. He earned a Master’s of Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. After working in the private sector for several years, Mr. Schneider joined the Claims Conference.
