Judah Gribetz, who as a top aide to Gov. Hugh L. Carey played a key role in helping New York City avoid financial collapse in the 1970s, and who decades later devised a complex plan for distributing $1.25 billion in restitution to half a million Holocaust survivors in a class-action suit against Swiss banks, died on June 26 at his home in the Rockaway Park neighborhood of Queens. He was 97.

The hundreds of thousands of claimants included people whose money, deposited in the banks to safeguard it from the Nazis, was not returned after WWII — enslaved laborers for German companies that had put their revenues in the banks, people whose Nazi-looted property was disposed of through Swiss institutions, members of the Romani community, disabled and gay people, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Mr. Gribetz has been given a “Solomonic role,” The Forward said, in having “to adjudicate between the competing needs of different groups of aging Holocaust survivors, from Florida to Ukraine. By 2020, when the last distributions were made, nearly $1.288 billion — an amount larger than the original settlement because of accumulated interest — had been distributed or allocated to more than 458,400 claimants.