Note: Correction appended.

WASHINGTON — The painful memory of the Holocaust has often served to unify the Jewish community, but a federal bill governing restitution claims is pitting survivors of the Nazi genocide against each other and against several leading Jewish organizations.

The legislation would give survivors the right to sue European insurance companies for proceeds that were never paid out when the Nazis plundered their homes after driving their families into ghettos and concentration camps during World War II.

Advocates for the bill say the unpaid claims could total in the billions of dollars and would provide at least a small measure of justice for survivors who have never been compensated for what they lost during the Holocaust. “It’s a fundamental human right that has been denied,” a Florida attorney who has spearheaded the effort, Samuel Dubbin, said. His client is the Holocaust Survivors Foundation, a nonprofit umbrella group encompassing dozens of survivor organizations from across the country and funded mainly by survivors, according to its treasurer, David Mermelstein.

Mr. Dubbin has worked closely with Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican, and Robert Wexler, a Democrat, the bipartisan co-sponsors of the bill in the House whose districts in Florida include some of the largest Jewish population centers in the nation.

They have met stiff resistance not only from the insurance companies who would have to pay the claims but also from prominent Jewish leaders and organizations, who say the potential flood of lawsuits would yield little benefit to survivors while jeopardizing years of painstaking negotiations and agreements with European countries and the insurers.

The battle has become increasingly acrimonious as the bill moves through Congress. Mr. Dubbin is accusing a chief opponent of the bill, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, of acting as an “agent for the German government,” while the conference treasurer, Roman Kent, an 83-year-old Auschwitz survivor, said, “Dubbin has one thing in mind — that’s to make money.” Both men reject the accusations.

The insurance industry has also made an aggressive push to defeat the bill, with the European insurers and American trade organizations spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees during the last year, according to federal disclosure documents.

At the center of the dispute is the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, or ICHEIC, which was established in 1998 to resolve unpaid claims. After an arduous and much-criticized negotiation process, the commission secured more than $306 million for 48,000 Holocaust survivors and heirs, according to congressional testimony earlier this year by the man who served as the chief American government representative on Holocaust issues during the Clinton administration, Stuart Eizenstat.

Led by Mr. Dubbin, the survivor groups say the commission was a failure, letting the European insurers off too easy and paying out only a small fraction of claims. In addition to the right to sue, they want the insurance companies to disclose the names of all policyholders in the period before World War II, so that survivors can confirm and provide backing for their claims.

Those who worked on the commission say they did the best they could. They point out that claims were determined based on extremely relaxed legal standards agreed to by the insurers to accommodate survivors who had no record of their family’s policy and who in many cases did not even know the name of the company it was under.

Many survivors came away from ICHEIC with little or nothing. Alex Moskovic was the only member of his family to survive the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald concentration camps. At the age of 14, he returned in 1945 to his family’s home in Hungary. “All I found were the bare walls,” he recalled in an interview. He dug up the yard where his father had said he buried the family’s insurance policy, but he found nothing.

Mr. Moskovic submitted a claim to ICHEIC, but the commission found no record of his family’s policy, despite the fact that the name was listed on its Web site indicating a policy had been sold to his family. He received $1,000 from a humanitarian fund designated for survivors whose claims had been denied.

Mr. Moskovic said he is not looking for a large payout for himself — “I am lucky. I am fairly well-off,” he said — but that a larger legal settlement with the insurers could help needy survivors who are struggling with mounting medical bills.

He is critical of a chief argument offered by opponents of the legislation — that it would damage American credibility by revoking the “legal peace” given to some insurers who agreed to participate in ICHEIC.

“It was the Claims Conference that made this deal,” Mr. Moskovic said. “Did they ask the claimants about this legal peace? No, they did not.”

The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims was headed by a man who served as secretary of state in the presidency of George H.W. Bush, Lawrence Eagleburger, and it came under heavy criticism from lawmakers and some survivors, who said the panel proceeded too slowly in investigating claims and spent exorbitant amounts of money on administrative costs.

At one point in 2001, the commission had spent more than $30 million on expenses while securing just $3 million for Holocaust survivors. Those costs included a $350,000 annual salary for Mr. Eagleburger and hundreds of thousands of dollars for first-class plane tickets and high-end hotels for staff members to attend commission meetings in major European cities.

In an interview, Mr. Eagleburger accepted the blame for problems with ICHEIC’s management, saying the commission expected its work to last two years, not eight, and that it could have been more frugal in its first months. “Some of those are legitimate, and I take responsibility for it,” he said of the criticism.

But he said the commission’s administrative problems “didn’t have any impact on the amount of money we could pay claimants.” “The ICHEIC process produced as much as we could possibly find,” Mr. Eagleburger said. He added later: “I know we worked damn hard for eight years.”

Mr. Eagleburger described the legislation now before Congress as “not only frivolous but fundamentally dangerous.” He said the bill could undercut the integrity of America’s diplomatic agreements and would yield few tangible benefits to survivors. The staunch support of the bill by Mr. Wexler and Ms. Ros-Lehtinen of Florida was “politically motivated,” he said, referring to the large number of Jewish voters and Holocaust survivors in their districts. “They’re looking for votes,” Mr. Eagleburger said. “It’s playing on emotions, not on reality.”

Mr. Eizenstat, who served in a number of positions in the State and Treasury departments during the Clinton administration and remains involved in the Holocaust claims dispute, also criticized the legislation, saying it would “set up terribly false expectations” for survivors and their heirs. “It’s just a bad idea,” he said.

Mr. Wexler and Ms. Ros-Lehtinen defended their support for the bill. “During my service in Congress, I have worked tirelessly to protect the interests of Holocaust survivors,” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said in a statement. “Advocates of survivor rights all share the singularly important goal of achieving justice for victims and their families. Many survivor organizations support this legislation because insurance companies, which are working overtime to block passage of the bill, have failed to settle claims.”

In his own statement, Mr. Wexler said the bill was introduced “to address the inequities of the ICHEIC process, which fell short of the expectations of thousands of Holocaust survivors who filed insurance claims and were either rejected summarily or paid nominal amounts in exchange for voiding their access to U.S. courts.” He added that Congress had a “moral obligation” to survivors and their families. “It is unconscionable that insurance companies unjustly profited at the expense of Holocaust survivors, and we must ensure that survivors are guaranteed legal recourse and the right to receive just compensation,” he said.

Opponents of the legislation, which include the Anti-Defamation League and B’nai B’rith International, among others, secured a victory late last month when the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, significantly scaled back the bill. Citing privacy concerns, he scrapped a provision requiring insurers publicly to disclose their policyholders, and he narrowed the cause of action for survivors to include only companies that refused to participate in ICHEIC.

Advocates of the bill, who had counted Mr. Frank as an ally, were stunned. “It’s not scaling it back. It’s eviscerating it,” Mr. Dubbin said.

In an interview, Mr. Frank said he was persuaded by the arguments of the Jewish groups opposed to the bill, but that he did not totally remove the right of survivors to sue. “I just looked at it on the merits,” he said.

Mr. Wexler pledged to continue advocating for the bill in its original form, and his aides are hoping to get the House Judiciary Committee to take it up, believing the legislation will have more support on that panel than on the Financial Services Committee.

The timing and scope of the amendments to the bill have also raised questions about ties of two Financial Services Committee staffers to the insurance industry. One week before the hearing where the changes to the legislation were approved, the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America announced it had hired the senior Republican counsel on the committee, Robert Gordon, as its senior vice president of policy development and research. Mr. Gordon begins his new job next month and is still working at the committee. He did not respond to requests for comment, and a committee spokeswoman, Marisol Garibay, issued a one-sentence statement on his behalf. “Robert has recused himself from all issues that would create a conflict of interest with his employer,” it said. Ms. Garibay did not respond to additional questions about Mr. Gordon’s role in the legislation, including whether he was continuing to work on the Holocaust legislation or whether he had informed the House Ethics Committee of his negotiations for employment with the insurers association, as required by a federal ethics law enacted last year.

“Certainly there is an appearance issue,” a spokeswoman for the watchdog group Common Cause, Mary Boyle, said, while emphasizing that she did not know all the facts involving Mr. Gordon. “The concern in these situations,” she said, is when a person who is supposed to be representing the public interest, such as a member of Congress or an aide, is simultaneously negotiating with a prospective employer that he or she may want to impress.

On the Democratic side of the committee, the majority counsel to Mr. Frank, Thomas Glassic, used to work for the law firm that is now lobbying on behalf of the Dutch reinsurers, who oppose the bill. In an interview, Mr. Frank said Mr. Glassic did not work for the reinsurers during his employment at the firm, which ended in 2004, and was not even aware they were clients. “He didn’t have any dealings with them,” Mr. Frank said, adding that in any case, the Dutch reinsurers “were not given any special treatment” in the bill and that “all the policy decisions were mine.”

The changes to the bill last month have fed the recriminations between the two sides. Mr. Kent, the claims conference treasurer who is negotiating for humanitarian claims with the German government, pointed the blame squarely at Mr. Dubbin, who has been working the case for years after serving as a lawyer in the Clinton administration. “He sees millions of dollars in this for himself,” Mr. Kent, who is chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, said. He said Mr. Dubbin and other supporters of the bill had exaggerated the potential for survivors to win claims through litigation, particularly when the standard of evidence would not be relaxed, as it was for ICHEIC. “It is a fairy tale,” Mr. Kent said. He called Mr. Dubbin’s statement that the Claims Conference was acting as a German agent “despicable,” coming “from a lawyer who has made millions off the sweat and blood of Holocaust survivors.” Mr. Kent said he had just spent six days in Berlin negotiating with the German government on behalf of the Claims Conference and securing $75 million for home care for Holocaust survivors.

Mr. Dubbin said it was “an insult” for Mr. Kent to question his motives. “The only way that any lawyer would be paid if this legislation passes is if a judge and jury find that Generali or Allianz or another global insurer wrongfully denied a Holocaust survivor or heir of a victim insurance proceeds that their parents paid for in good faith 60 years ago,” he said. “This is what the survivors want and deserve just like any other American citizen.”

Correction: Less than $1.15 million is the amount that the law firm Dubbin and Kravetz has earned in Holocaust-related work over a ten year period. A quote contained in an article that began on page one of the July 23 New York Sun overstated the amount.