Madera Series on Year-End Giving: Gil Bendix
Posted by Amy Wachler, Communications Associate on November 16, 2009
Gilbert Bendix, a friend and neighbor of the Madera Group, truly embodies the spirit of giving. Gil, a soft-spoken 85-year-old, has been giving to charitable organizations for years, including Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders, Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano and MBIRA, a non-profit organization that preserves and promotes Zimbabwean music. But it wasn’t until 2003 that his story took an extraordinary turn.
Sitting down to read the San Francisco Chronicle one April morning, an article caught his attention. According to an international commission base in the Netherlands, after years of delay and obfuscation, German insurance companies would be releasing the names of 363,232 German Jews who had bought insurance policies before or during the Hitler era.
Although Gil and his immediate family left Germany for the United States in 1936, the wider family, those that escaped the Holocaust, were scattered all over the globe. Now, 67 years later, Gil decided to check for family members on the commission’s web site. Discovering the names of three of his four grandparents, he unloaded the lengthy claims application forms. Before filing the forms, however, Gil spent weeks drawing family trees and researching the names and addresses of his still-living his relatives, many of whom he had never met but were potential heirs.
Still, Gil had some hesitation about pursuing the matter. “I had put Germany behind me long ago,” he says. “I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I didn’t want their money, but I didn’t want the thieves to get away with robbing the corpses of my relatives.”
Several months later, a German insurance firm informed him that his father had taken out a life insurance policy in 1930 and, in due time, thousands of dollars arrived for Gil to share with his sister. Then, the commission sent Gil $1,000 to thank him for his efforts. It didn’t stop there. By 2005, thousands more arrived after another insurance company discovered a policy his father had taken out in 1927.
Yet, something didn’t feel right. Gil realized that he’d started on this path because the process seemed like a chance to find closure. “There are at least two new generations of Germans,” he says, “and most of them have made a sincere effort to deal with the sins of their fathers.” Despite this understanding, he couldn’t ignore knowing that extreme suffering still exists throughout the world. “Maybe I could have found closure if it hadn’t been for Cambodia…and Rwanda, Bosnia and now Darfur…Purgatory will not end in the near future. We’re a flawed species.”
Rather than keep the German money, Gil gave it to the American Civil Liberties Foundation, an organization protecting human rights. In addition, he added the tax benefit he would have received in income tax reductions to his donation as well.
Gil says that his motivation to give comes from the realization that, long after his personal experience of the Nazi era, genocide and war still plague the world, not to mention hunger and pandemics. It is that understanding that compels Gil to keep giving each year. Last year, he made donations to over 20 charitable organizations and political campaigns. Gil’s actions remind us that, whether large or small, there’s value in all of our giving this season.
