No subject

those campaigning to recover dormant accounts. After a nearly
five-year parliamentary investigation, lawmakers identified up to
9,000 bank accounts investigators suspected belonged to victims.

Banks implicated in the report rejected 2005 findings as speculative.
So lawmakers established the Company in 2006.

A $3.15 million claim the Company has prepared against Mizrahi Tafahot
Bank Ltd. grew out of a faded banker's memo that drew attention during
the Knesset hearings. Dated Oct. 29, 1939, eight weeks after the Nazis
blitzed Poland, the document pledges deposits held by European Jews,
mostly in Poland, as collateral on a loan from another bank.

"The depositors cannot claim their deposits now because they are
abroad or we foresee that they won't claim the money for other
reasons," the memo reads in Hebrew. A representative of Mizrahi Bank
declined to comment.

Mr. Roet has proved to be a dogged adversary. He was chosen as the
Company's chairman because he had led a group that helped secure a
series of Holocaust settlements in the Netherlands valued at more than
$300 million.

After the arrest of his two sisters in 1943 and their deportation to
Auschwitz, he shuttled among more than a dozen Christian homes,
finishing out the war pretending to be the son of a Catholic couple on
a dairy farm in southern Holland. "I learned to milk cows," he says.

He came to Israel alone in 1946 at age 17, then went on to build
successful businesses, including one importing raw materials for
Israel's booming pharmaceutical industry. But he has dedicated his
retirement to Holocaust victims.

Last year, Mr. Roet began assembling his team. Accountants, archivists
and self-styled gumshoes occupy workspaces that offer few hints about
the task at hand. Holocaust-related records are hidden behind the
covers of blue and red binders shelved near a Homer Simpson poster.

Although the parliamentary findings made banks natural targets when
the Company opened, there were few clues about land in Israel
purchased by those who were later killed in the Holocaust. Jewish
academics documented a more than threefold increase in Jewish land
purchases in British Palestine from 1914 to 1940. Parcels were sold in
Europe by traveling Zionist salesman.

Across Israel, the Company so far has title to about 480 individual
parcels, 300 of which were handed over by the government. They are in
some of Israel's hottest areas, including trendy Tel Aviv. The Company
values the lands it holds so far at about $86.7 million.

Laying claim to land is also proving difficult. Company staff
identified the land of one victim in a fertile plain near the edge of
a northern Israeli town called Kiryat Atta. But when they arrived to
survey it, they found a cemetery had been built there.

Investigators discovered another lot in one of Israel's most affluent
enclaves, a hilltop neighborhood of Haifa overlooking the sea. A
10-room home in the neighborhood can list for more than $4 million.
The owner of a villa adjacent to the plot simply expanded onto the
unused property.

"He has a Jacuzzi in there," says Noa Blecher, who is the Company's
top real-estate sleuth. Mr. Roet says the Company is taking the
hot-tub owner to court.

Based on evidence uncovered thus far, Mr. Roet believes there are
scores of still-hidden parcels across the nation.

While the quest for assets is under way, so is the hunt for heirs.
While trying to piece together records in Europe and listing recovered
assets on its Web site, the Company has reached into the country's
Holocaust legacy to seek out victims' families.

The Company's Elinor Kritoru appears regularly on an Israeli radio
show called Hipoos Krovim, which means "searching for relatives" in
Hebrew. It first aired in 1945, broadcasting the pleas of Holocaust
survivors looking for lost loved ones. It later went off the air, but
returned in 2000 as a more generic reunion show.

Ms. Kritoru's appearances echo bygone broadcasts, as she calls out the
names of the dead.

"We're looking for the heirs of Yitzhak Meir Abeliov, from Bialystock,
Poland," she said earlier this year. "We'd be very happy to find the
descendents of David Tishanski....We're also looking for heirs of
Lazar Abeleff from Kononov, Ukraine."

Write to Cam Simpson at cam.simpson at wsj.com

The Quest for Restitution
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