by dina kraft
jta
tel aviv | Gita Koifman’s phone rings every day with tales of hardship large and small from needy Holocaust survivors.
One day it is the man who did not have money to pay for the pills he was prescribed after heart surgery. During last summer’s war with Hezbollah, it was repeated pleas from an elderly couple who live in a fifth-floor walkup and could not make it to the bomb shelter.
More recently it was a tearful call from a woman who could not even afford to buy a nice dress for her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah.
All the callers were immigrants from the former Soviet Union, a group that comprises the most poverty-stricken segment of Israel’s estimated 240,000 Holocaust survivors. They are among those who will benefit from a new $373 million government allocation announced last week.
“We did not get the optimum sum that we could have, but I think we made progress as this really is a historic achievement after so many years of struggle,” said Koifman, who heads a group representing survivors from the former Soviet Union. “This is the first time the government of Israel dealt with the situation of survivors in Israel — in itself an achievement.”
The funding deal came after the government came under intense and embarrassing pressure from Holocaust survivors and organizations.
A previous funding initiative announced with great fanfare by the Olmert government in August had been dismissed by survivors and their advocates as insignificant.
Matters came to a dramatic head this summer when a group of survivors, some of them wearing concentration camp uniforms and yellow stars, marched together with relatives and supporters through the streets of Jerusalem toward the Knesset demanding justice.
Their criticism was fueled by a sense that the Israeli government for decades systematically ignored survivors’ needs and that time was becoming short as survivors age and their needs intensify.
On Oct. 15, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced the allocation of the additional money, saying it would help ease the financial burdens of the so-called “second circle” of Holocaust survivors — those who fled the Nazis and became refugees, most of them living out the war and its aftermath in the Soviet Union.
A large number have immigrated to Israel in the past 15 years, swelling the ranks of the neediest survivors.
Olmert called the funding “an important moral step” and said he hoped it would help correct a historical wrong.
“The state never gave those who survived the Holocaust the attention and resources it put into memorializing those who died in the Holocaust,” Olmert said, acknowledging a deep-seated grudge held by survivors in Israel.
The new allocation adds to the package of benefits for survivors of concentration camps and ghettos, known as first-circle survivors, announced in August. That money is earmarked for survivors who did not receive restitution from the German government or have received minimal funds from Israel.
About two-thirds of the $373 million will be slotted for increased welfare payments to cover all senior citizens in Israel. The rest will be earmarked specifically for second-circle survivors, who were excluded in the original draft of the deal.
In addition to increased welfare payments, the second-circle survivors will be entitled to monthly allowances of between about $40 to $125, calculated according to age and financial need.
The first-circle survivors were granted allowances of $284 a month under the deal made in August. The funds are also linked to their income level and age.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California