FEATURED JOBS
When my father was a Merchant Marine in the early ‘50s, one of his fellow seamen – a non-Jew—asked him a question regarding Israel. At that point, the state was only a few years old, born out of the ashes of the Holocaust, surrounded by belligerent neighbors, and absorbing millions of Jews from Europe and the Arab lands. Yet no one was starving or living in the same kind of indescribable squalor as seen in Third World nations, the sailor said.
“How does Israel do it?” he asked earnestly, to which my father replied, “Simple – Jews take care of their own.”
Among friends and foes, Jews are known for doing just that – taking care of their own. Others cite it in pressing for taking care of the needy in their own communities. But an article I read over the weekend penned by a Tribune Newspapers writer made me wonder if our reputation for always helping our brothers and sisters isn’t somewhat overblown at times.
The story was about a housing shelter in Haifa that serves Holocaust survivors. The article chronicles how these elderly people, who survived the worst horrors imaginable, now live in relative poverty and isolation.
“We helped found the state of Israel and built it. They should make our final years better,” said one of the residents, Miryam Kremin, 88, a Polish ghetto survivor.
The article went on to say that an estimated 70,000 survivors in Israel can’t make ends meet and often go to soup kitchens or welfare agencies for help. The aid that some survivors receive in German reparations, administered by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, just isn’t cutting it as these survivors get further into their “golden years” and require more health treatments and assistance. (Others get nothing because they can’t prove they are really survivors.)
The Israeli government says it’s working to improve services for survivors, and doled out $700 million this year for 87,000 survivors.
But somehow, too many Holocaust survivors in Israel – and in the United States and elsewhere – are falling through the cracks.
Is the organized American Jewish community – which provides so much assistance to Jews here and all around the world – doing enough to help survivors in their final years? The survivors I know in town tell me, unequivocally, no. And judging by what I’ve read about this shelter in Haifa, I tend to think they’re right.
Dollars are tight, no doubt about it. Times are tough. But these people only have a few more years, and have endured the kind of hell we can’t even begin to imagine. Isn’t it incumbent upon Jews, as my father put it more than a half-century ago, to “take care of their own”?
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