Israel to revise Holocaust survivors' allowance plan
Israel’s government will revise a widely-criticised plan to grant needy Holocaust survivors a monthly allowance of £10 (€15), officials said today, after survivors said the plan was laughable.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced the plan this week in response to concern about poverty among the some 240,000 Israelis who survived the Nazi genocide, saying he was “correcting a 60-year-old blight”,
But the meagre sum – 83 shekels a month (€15) – drew scorn from survivors, and after a meeting last night between Olmert’s staff and survivor representatives, the sides released a joint statement saying the government would look into new solutions.
The government and the survivors “decided to set a short timetable during which the pressing matters on the agenda will be worked out,” leading up to a meeting between Olmert and the survivors next week, the statement said.
Noah Flug, chair of a consortium of survivors’ groups, said the allowance was now “off the agenda”. Speaking on Army Radio, Flug said he was confident that Olmert’s representatives “want to solve the problem.”
Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Second World War, and hundreds of thousands who survived concentration camps travelled to Israel after the war. Many suffered physical or psychological damage from the torture and deprivation they suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
Six decades after the war ended, the remaining survivors are elderly and many are poor. Many have been unable to provide for their last years, finding themselves chronically short of funds for medical and psychological treatment, medication and food.
Olmert’s original plan was widely ridiculed. “This doesn’t solve anything,” survivor Avraham Roet, 79, said after it was announced. “The government doesn’t understand the significance of the Holocaust and what horrors the survivors went through. If they did, they wouldn’t propose this absurd and insulting plan.”
