PRAGUE – Stuart Eizenstat, who led the U.S. government delegation to the June 26-29 Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague, sat down with JTA for an interview on the eve of the conference.

The conference, organized by the Czech government, brought together representatives of 49 countries for what participants said was likely to be the last major attempt to compensate Holocaust victims and their heirs for art and property confiscated or sold under duress during the Nazi era.

Eizenstat, a lawyer who served as undersecretary of state under President Clinton and recently was appointed chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, is largely credited with getting Jewish property restitution started in the former Eastern bloc after the end of the Communist era. He also was the lead negotiator in the $1.25 billion settlement with Swiss banks in 1999.

PRAGUE – Just when charitable agencies are struggling to provide services, 46 nations have called for greater aid to needy Holocaust survivors. No one suggests that communal agencies take on this obligation, but in the United States, immediate support is unlikely to come from any other source.

With a declaration endorsed on Tuesday at the Terezin concentration camp, the nations — primarily European — concluded a four-day conference on Holocaust-era assets. The conference, hosted by the Czech Republic, was the first international diplomatic forum on Nazi victims’ material losses in slightly over a decade. It also was the first to include the social welfare of survivors on the agenda.

“It is unacceptable that those who suffered so greatly during the earlier part of their lives should live under impoverished circumstances at the end,” said the Terezin Declaration.

PRAGUE – Ten European Union countries where claimants of looted art, communal property, or private property face serious obstacles:

• Poland: Has not enacted any form of private restitution or compensation for an estimated $30.5 billion worth of property confiscated by Nazis or Communists. The Jewish share of claims on those properties is estimated at 20 percent to 27 percent. Poland has a very slow and burdensome process for restitution of Jewish communal property. Since 1997, 5,500 claims were filed but only 1,625 were adjudicated.

PRAGUE – It has the tone of a newspaper from Berlin in 1936, except it’s from Vilnius in 2009.

The face of a rabbi is enlarged on the cover of a Lithuanian tabloid with the words “Give it now!” emblazoned across the top. The subject, Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international affairs for the American Jewish Committee, is cast as the villain, looking down on a miniature Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, portrayed as defenseless at the hands of some Shylock.

The image, which appeared on the June 26 edition of the popular right-wing daily Vakaro Zinios (The Evening News), alludes to Baker’s demand that the Lithuanian government return Jewish property after eight years of promises to do so.

TEL AVIV – When two top Israeli army commanders in the west bank received threatening letters in early June, the suspects weren’t the army’s traditional enemies in the territory.

Instead, Israeli Jews angry about the army’s recent demolition of several illegal settlement outposts appeared to have sent the letters.

One compared the soldiers to Nazis, calling the officers “a gang of Jews with wretched souls, reminiscent of the Judenrat.”

Another said, “We know where you live. We will get to both you and your family.”

HAVAT GILAD, west bank – “The water is out again,” Batsie Zar shouts to her husband, Itai, from the kitchen.

He quickly gets on his cell phone, trying to get one of the other young men in this isolated hilltop — one of about 100 illegal settlement outposts across the west bank — to turn it back on.

If it’s not the water, it’s the creaky generator for electricity that fails, Itai Zar cheerfully complains as wind whistles against the window panes of his compact home here. In the winter, a fire crackles in the wood stove Zar welded together to cook meals for the family.

YITZHAR, west bank – The Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in this Jewish settlement looks more like a well-fortified auto repair shop than a house of learning.

Located in an industrial neighborhood, the yeshiva has a drab aluminum exterior and a tin roof, and is surrounded by a metal gate. A small guardhouse sits out front, and teenage boys wearing oversized, thick-knit kippot walk in and out of the gate and past a lonely basketball hoop.

Appearances notwithstanding, these students and their teachers have become the face of radical Jewish nationalism in Israel.

Howard Brown of Cresskill wanted to go somewhere he hadn’t been before. He decided on Cuba.

But the United States has had an embargo on the small Communist country for decades, preventing trade and travel — except for humanitarian reasons.

Brown called Howard Charish, executive vice president of UJA Federation Northern New Jersey, to discuss sending a mission to the island nation to learn about and help the small Jewish community there.

“I’ve never been [to Cuba] and I decided to go,” said Brown, who with his wife Nancy was among the trip’s co-chairs. “I felt like a lot of people who went on the trip would like to see how the Jewish community is surviving and what we can do to help out.”