Franz Molnar’s Heirs Fight Over His Bank Account, And Their Identity

Interesting, if slightly off topic (as if we have one)-

Novelist and playwright Franz Molnar’s life was always high on drama. He wrote works that were turned into Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals, including the Rodgers and Hammerstein favorite “Carousel.” In his personal life, Molnar fled Hungary to escape the Nazis and lived the high life in New York City until his death in 1952.

Now, a new chapter in the Jewish émigré’s story is playing out long after his death. This drama involves Molnar’s Swiss bank accounts, an Episcopal priest, Jewish family mythology and an allegation of fraud.

The Swiss bank accounts causing all the trouble were left behind by Molnar and his wife when they fled Hungary before the Nazi onslaught. Like thousands of other Swiss bank accounts lost in the war years, Molnar’s were made public in the Holocaust restitution process a few years back, when a tribunal was set up to disburse the proceeds.

In 2007, Molnar’s great-grandson, Gabor Lukin, came forward to make a claim for the money from these accounts. For years, Lukin was among a few descendants of Molnar who had received royalties from the playwright’s estate, and Lukin assumed that his family also would receive the funds from Molnar’s bank accounts.

The problem was that another family of Molnars already had claimed the money. Elizabeth Rhodes, a corporate consultant from Ohio, had submitted a claim in 2001 for the bank accounts on behalf of her aunt and her father, an Episcopal priest named Peter Molnar. In claiming the funds, Rhodes noted that most of her family is not Jewish, but she pointed to family lore in arguing that her Jewish great-grandfather had been the brother of Franz Molnar.

Rhodes’s claim reached the tribunal first, and her family was awarded $226,000 in 2004. But since Molnar’s real heirs have come forward, the lawyer overseeing the tribunal, Michael Bradfield, has said the relation that Rhodes originally asserted was “completely undocumented, and entirely implausible.”

More here-

http://forward.com/articles/108795/