SURPRISE: YOU'RE JEWISH AND A MULTI-MILLIONAIRE

Brothers learn they own Austrian building, and that they’re Jewish

by joe eskenazi, staff writer, SF Jewish Bulletin

Imagine that instead of chucking it into the recycling bin within milliseconds of pulling it out of the mailbox, you actually opened the Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelope.  Now imagine that the statement “You may already be a multimillionaire!” was accurate. You won.  Now imagine that, in addition to providing incredible material wealth, the envelope also revealed unknown and, frankly, disturbing family details.

This is no fantasy for Los Altos’ Chris Andrews.  The 49-year-old consultant and businessman and his 53-year-old brother, Rich, a tennis coach and former player living in Folsom, were notified in 2001 by a German bank that they were the rightful owners of a six-story, 100-room building in one of Vienna’s tonier districts.

And, by they way — he and his family were told they’re Jewish.  “No, we didn’t know anything about that,” said Chris Andrews about his family’s Jewish roots. “When we were growing up, our mother would say from time to time that the Jewish people were our friends. I remember that distinctly,” added Rich Andrews, a practicing Catholic.

The building is currently owned by the Austrian government, which has not been willing to hand over the keys. After years of legal wrangling, an Austrian panel ruled in favor of the Andrews brothers in mid-November. The building, known as Schmidgasse 14, is currently leased by the U.S. government and houses the U.S. embassy. It is likely worth many, many millions of dollars.

The Andrews brothers’ mother, Betty Redlich, never told them she was Jewish and had escaped her native Austria shortly before Hitler returned home to great fanfare. And she certainly never told them about the high-end health clinic in Schmidgasse 14 operated by her cousin, Lothar Furth, who killed himself during the German occupation. The brothers discovered all this in their research during the last four years.