WASHINGTON » Sixty-six years after she survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Renee Firestone is still trying to find out what became of an insurance policy that she suspects her father, who died in the Holocaust, took out from an Italian insurer before the war. Firestone, 87, expected resistance from the insurance companies that fielded claims from many thousands of Holocaust survivors and their heirs. What she did not foresee, said Firestone, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Czechoslovakia who became a fashion designer in Los Angeles, was the opposition from her own government — including the State Department and Congress — to her getting her day in court.

"What’s so painful is that we can see they’re just waiting for all of us to die," she said.

The legal claims by hundreds of U.S. survivors like Firestone have set off an intense lobbying campaign in Washington on their behalf. But opposition from the government and even from leading Jewish groups has created an uncomfortable rift between groups that are normally in alliance and has created a potential minefield for President Barack Obama.

"The whole thing saddens me," Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate who is perhaps the most well-known Holocaust survivor, said of the rift over the insurance benefits. "I don’t know how or why this has happened, but the survivors should be helped however we can."

The State Department, under both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, has vigorously opposed the idea of allowing survivors to press claims in court against European insurance companies because they say it would undermine a reparations agreement that the United States reached in 2000 with Germany, which led to $300 million in insurance payments to survivors and their heirs.

The threat of private lawsuits, administration officials say, treads on the president’s authority to set foreign policy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last year validated the State Department’s position as it dismissed claims brought against an Italian insurance company, Generali, which had issued many policies before the Holocaust to European Jews who wanted to protect themselves financially against the rise of Nazi power.

"The State Department is concerned that lawsuits by the survivors could not only disrupt prior agreements with European governments but might also have a negative impact on other reparation agreements growing out of the Holocaust as well," the department said in a statement Friday.

In line with the State Department, leading Jewish groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League have also opposed the survivors’ attempts to plead their case in court and have lobbied against prior efforts by Congress to intervene, as have the insurance companies themselves.

Now, however, a new push in Congress on behalf of the survivors appears to be gaining some ground.

"I’m feeling optimistic that this is our year," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who introduced legislation in the House in March that would force insurers to disclose the names of Holocaust-era policyholders and allow survivors and their heirs to seek claims in U.S. courts.

Ros-Lehtinen, whose maternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews and whose Miami area district includes many survivors, said she is well aware of the stiff opposition the idea has generated and the concerns from the government about undermining foreign agreements.

"This will not usurp anybody’s authority," she said in an interview. "This is about giving the survivors their day in court. We’ve already waited too long."

One group of survivors, known as the Holocaust Survivors Foundation USA, has been ratcheting up its efforts in recent weeks to bring pressure on the Obama administration and on leading Jewish groups to change their stance on the volatile insurance issue.

The survivors group took out full-page advertisements in Jewish and mainstream newspapers this month accusing leading Jewish groups like the American Jewish Committee of "dishonoring" the memories of the Holocaust.

The ads accused Jewish groups of "protecting" European insurers like Allianz because the insurers give money to American-Jewish causes. (Allianz, based in Germany, had committed in 2008 to buy naming rights to the New Meadowlands Stadium for $25 million a year, but the Jets and the Giants pulled out of talks after publicity over the company’s role in insuring Nazi facilities, including Auschwitz, and of blocking payment of survivors’ claims after the Holocaust.)

Eighteen survivors also sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton a nine-page letter last week expressing their anger and disappointment over the treatment of their claims.

"It is beyond the pale that we should be perceived as the adversary of our government, to be gamed and denied what was ours and was stolen from us by companies with the protection of the most vicious regime in history," they wrote. A copy of the letter was provided to the .

Sam Dubbin, a Miami lawyer who works with a number of Holocaust survivors, said the current proposal in Congress is "the last, best hope" for correcting what he says is a historical injustice. He said that the claims process set in place by the 2000 agreement with Germany was rife with abuse and that money paid out from it represented only a small fraction of the $20 billion in current dollars that was owed on Holocaust-era insurance policies.

The bulk of the claims have gone unpaid, Dubbin said, while many of the survivors are living in poverty in cities around the United States. "It’s an utter disgrace," he said.

Susan Rubin, 84, a Hungarian native who survived Auschwitz and now lives in Brooklyn, said that she spotted the name of her father, Jozsef Rosenfeld, who died at Auschwitz, on a listing of unclaimed insurance policies in 2001. It indicated he had taken out a policy with Generali in Budapest. But after she put in her claim, the processors rejected it for lack of evidence; she was unable to prove that her father, Jozsef Rosenfeld, was the same one who took out the policy.

Incensed and dejected, she and her husband, Nathan, wrote to legislators in Washington and Albany to ask for help, but they got no response.

"It’s not about the money," Rubin said. "It’s about what they took away from us. You figure there’s any hope now? There’s not too many years left for us."

Opponents of the lawsuits concede that the insurance claims process put in place a decade ago was slow and imperfect, but they say the complaints from some survivors are misinformed and driven more by the agendas of class-action lawyers than by legitimate grievances.

The accusation from Dubbin’s group that Jewish leaders have neglected survivors because of their own agendas "is awful and horrible and offensive," said Rabbi Andrew Baker, the director of the international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

"We have been fighting for Holocaust survivors for decades," Baker said.

He pointed, for instance, to a recent agreement forged with Germany by the State Department and Jewish groups to secure more than $500 million in financing for home care for elderly Holocaust survivors.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a special envoy to the State Department who worked on the recent home-care agreement and is credited with forging a number of key Holocaust reparations agreements in the last 15 years, said it was distressing to see the government’s efforts, and his own personal integrity, now under attack by some survivors.

"I can’t figure it out," he said. "It’s just very, very sad."

© 2011 The New York Times Company