Jerusalem - After an acrimonious summer-long debate about Israel’s treatment of its Holocaust survivors, the Israeli government inked a controversial deal Sunday that will provide millions of dollars in financial aid to some survivors.
The plight of Israel’s Holocaust survivors, of whom there are estimated to be 260,000, has been on public display since the release of two reports earlier this year that pointed to high levels of poverty among their ranks. The government was slow to react, and a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was confronted with a protest march in which survivors donned striped pajamas and yellow Stars of David.
The new package of benefits, agreed upon by Olmert’s Cabinet, will provide direct funds for people who lived through the death camps, labor camps and ghettos. But the legislation was criticized immediately by many survivor advocates, who said it leaves out tens of thousands of people who lived in Nazi-occupied countries but did not end up in the camps.
The legislation and the anger directed against Olmert are part of the latest, and probably last, stage in Israel’s long and ambivalent relationship with its survivors.
“Now, Olmert is being made to pay for the sins of governments past,” said Shira Hantman, a gerontologist and sociologist who is dean of Tel Hai Academic College in the Galilee.
This history was put into stark relief Monday, when the speaker of the Knesset, Dalia Itzik, issued an apology to Holocaust survivors on behalf of the Israeli government.
“We are here to rectify the situation so that we may be able to look into the survivors’ eyes and tell them on behalf of Israeli society, ‘We apologize,’” Itzik said in a special session of the Knesset.
From the earliest days of the Jewish state, the country has had an uneasy relationship with survivors of the Shoah. Israeli society in its infancy was focused on building a new archetype of a strong Jew, and the survivors’ discomfort brought about widespread discomfort.
Survivors themselves protested Israel’s acceptance of $750 million in German reparations in the early 1950s, dubbing it blood money. The money was paid directly to Israel rather than to survivors, leading to some of the recent bitterness.
Hantman said that in those years, survivors were concerned mostly with building a nation, rebuilding their families and fitting in. It wasn’t until after the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 that Israeli survivors broke their silence.
“There was an unspoken code that Auschwitz was left behind — a sort of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” Hantman said.
While the German government has since begun to provide pensions for survivors, the Israeli government has given little in the way of extra benefits.
The government’s belated acknowledgement of the survivors’ situation follows a pair of reports giving the revelation that a third of Israel’s Holocaust survivors live well below the poverty line. The first report, published in April by the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund, found that as many as 80,000 survivors in Israel depend predominantly on government welfare.
The second report, published August 16 by Israel’s comptroller, Micha Lindenstrauss, found that 143,000 of the survivors are ineligible for state aid — the bulk of them so-called “Holocaust refugees,” needy survivors who fled Europe for the former Soviet Union.
The Lindenstrauss report skewered the government, saying, “The conduct of state authorities is characterized often times by unnecessary delays, postponements and foot-dragging.”
Israeli historian Tom Segev said that given Germany’s extensive reparations program for Holocaust survivors, “it could be that Germany treated the survivors better than the State of Israel did.”
The nadir came just before the comptroller’s report was published. Early this month, the government tabled an offer of a $20 monthly stipend to survivors, leading to such banner headlines as “How Dare They” in Israel’s newspapers. On August 5, thousands of survivors and their supporters marched in Jerusalem. Some wore the Star of David, others T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “The Holocaust is still with us,” but most marched silently.
The deal brokered this week was more generous on some fronts than the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund had hoped for. It includes $275 monthly stipends given to some 7,000 survivors who have never received direct compensation from the German government.
Thousands of others will receive a one-time sum of about $700. Eventually, the government will transfer the funds to the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund, which will be tasked with distributing the aid.
But the only way the government was able to beef up stipends was by having some receive nothing at all. Those excluded from the current deal include roughly 85,000 “Holocaust refugees.”
The government has categorized this group as “the second circle”; those who lived under the rule of the Nazis or their allies are considered “the first circle.” While the state technically regards the former as survivors, it does not intend to compensate them as such, according to the Social Affairs Ministry.
Olmert told reporters that he feared he would create an “ethnic divide” if he subsidized European refugees but not the hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled persecution in Arab countries during the late ’40s and early ’50s.
Olmert’s decision was immediately controversial. Last Tuesday, Knesset member Ophir Pines-Paz noted that under the current rules, Anne Frank would not have received financial aid from the Israeli government if she had survived the Holocaust.
One of the deal’s negotiators, Uri Hanoch of the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund, said that the money will enable “thousands of survivors to live out their lives with some dignity.” He vowed, however, to fight on until all the survivors get their due.
Hanoch, who is a survivor of Dachau, said that the experience of Europeans during the Nazi era is unique and should be recognized as such.
“Half of my brethren, people who really need the help, will get nothing,” Hanoch said. “This is not right.”
Even survivors who will receive the aid greeted the news with some ambivalence.
“It’s too late,” said Elizabeth Dragowski, an 81-year-old who fled her native Lithuania and the doomed Kovno Ghetto to join Russian partisans in the forests.
Dragowski has buried her two husbands. Today, only her cats and her dog, Shahi, keep her company in a cramped Jerusalem studio brimming with rotting cat food. With the new money coming in, “maybe I can buy my friends better cat food,” she said, motioning to the cats curling up on her bed.
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
Copyright © 2013, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Claims Conference Chief Knew of $57M Holocaust Fraud Probe Earlier 
Cleveland Kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart and Us
Rama Burshtein Offers Rare Glimpse of Orthodox World
Ethical Kosher Seal Stalls Amid Orthodox Opposition
'War' With Ultra-Orthodox at Kotel? Bring It On
You've successfully signed up!
Israel should be ashamed of their treatment of Holocaust survivors. In 1948, the survivors were used as cannon fodder. For years they were looked down upon, as if they brought the catastrophe on themselves. The truth is that without the Holocaust there would not be an Israel and without the 100 billion dollar payment from Germany, Israel would not have survived. The Zionists should get down on their hands and knees and thank the survivors for "surviving". Without them Israel would still be dream.
Ohlmert is not paying. The Government of Israel received over 80 billion dollars as reparations, some it not deserved. You'd think they could spare a little for the victims they collected for.
As a first generation German whose mother was put in a work concentration camp (not Jewish)and whose uncle (Hungarian) watched as his mother was burned alive in an oven I was at first stunned at Israel's treatment of their own people. Then I remembered it crossing my mind over and over again through the years as stories emerged of the Israelis' cruelty to others. I just finished reading T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" (what an incredible writer and memoir) the seeds of the birth Israel occurred in the early 1900's not in the 1940's. I thought there is a deeper story here; and whatever that beginning was has no compassion for Holocaust survivors. I visited Dachau as a ten year old child. Those images, the horror and the tour of the camp will forever be with me. My father was with Patton's 3rd Army when they liberated Buchwald. His descriptions will forever be with me.
how can i meet some one who has survived Holocaust? Please help me im really interested ( i live in NY)