Gregg Salzman was having lunch in Jerusalem when the suicide bomber detonated himself — blasting shrapnel into his body and forcing him into a 19-year personal and legal struggle unlikely to end soon.
“It is like someone has a tennis racket the size of your body, and they swing it at full speed and they just whack you,” Salzman said of the blast. “When I came to, I just remember running.”
Hamas took responsibility for the September 1997 terror attack on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, which killed four people and injured 188. Photos of the aftermath fill in the blanks of Salzman’s memory.
“My shoes were in the pictures, my books. I wasn’t recognizable. I was literally covered in the bomber’s flesh, from head to toe. It was a miracle that I was alive.”
Shrapnel lodged in his face and arm. The pain is debilitating.
“I was never suicidal but — the pain is enough to kill you,” he said.
American courts have awarded terror victims $43.5 billion in default judgments against Iran, widely recognized as financially backing such attacks.
Salzman, 44, a New Jersey native now in Miami, was awarded $10 million in 2003 by a Washington DC court. His co-plaintiff, Avi Elishis, 36, of New Jersey, also hurt in the bombing, got $12 million. Each was awarded $37.5 million in punitive damages.
The money never came. Iran ignored the courts. In April, the US Supreme Court ruled $2 billion worth of Iranian assets frozen by the Obama administration could be paid to 1,300 terror victims or their relatives. It’s known as the Peterson case, for Deborah Peterson, whose US Marine brother Lance Cpl. James Knipple was killed in Beirut in the 1996 bombing of an American barracks.
Other victims had joined the Peterson case and now expect to get paid, including victims of the Ben Yehuda attack.
But not Salzman and Elishis.
Salzman says their legal reps’ negligence in not making sure the men were included in the class action was “like I’m being blown up again. They’re worse to me than Hamas.”
The American Center for Civil Justice, which has helped some victims in exchange for a 20-percent cut of their damage awards, helped Salzman and Elishis file suit. But it has done little for them since, the men charge in a Manhattan Federal Court case.
ACCJ didn’t include the men in the Peterson case, which could have netted them a collective $11.09 million, they charge.
“My guys get nothing because these people forgot to include them in the case,” said the pair’s attorney, Robert Tolchin.
But Salzman and Elishis are set to get “millions” from a terror victims compensation fund established by the federal government and “that would not have occurred but for the efforts of the American Center,” an ACCJ lawyer said.
Salzman and Elishis’ lawsuit “is an attempt to avoid fulfilling their commitment” to the center, said the ACCJ lawyer.
Tolchin said the federal compensation fund cited by the ACCJ is new and untested, and its future payouts are uncertain.