A 'heart' for Holocaust survivors

Reparations do not spare many Holocaust survivors living in Israel from destitution.

By JOHN BLACK
Project HEART 311 (photo credit: Project HEART)
Project HEART 311
(photo credit: Project HEART)
With tens of thousands of elderly Holocaust survivors in Israel struggling to make ends meet, efforts to care for their needs have revived memories of one of the most painful and polarizing debates in the history of the modern State of Israel – the controversy in 1951–1952 over German reparations for the Holocaust .
The Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany proposed that West Germany pay over 3 billion Deutschmarks to the state of Israel in order to resettle over 500,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel as compensation for the Nazi’s use of Jews as slave laborers and their pillaging of Jewish property during World War II.
Fierce opposition to the agreement emerged from both ends of the Israeli political spectrum, as elements on the Left and Right argued that accepting payment was tantamount to forgiving the atrocious crimes of the Nazis.
“Nazism is rearing its ugly head again in Germany, and our so-called Western ‘friends’ are nurturing that Nazism; they are resurrecting Nazi Germany,” MK Yaakov Chazan of the socialist Mapam party warned the Knesset in November 1951. “Our army, the Israel Defense Forces, will be in the same camp as the Nazi army, and the Nazis will begin infiltrating here not as our most terrible enemies, but rather as our allies...”
Two days before the Knesset was set to vote on the reparations agreement, and with the IDF on high alert to put down a potential mutiny, right-wing leader Menachem Begin delivered an impassioned speech to over 15,000 protestors, including many Holocaust survivors, in Jerusalem’s Zion Square.
Begin thundered: “When you fired your cannon at us [referring to David Ben-Gurion’s order to shell the Altalena], I gave an order: ‘No!’ Today, I will give an order: Yes! We know that you will show us no mercy, but this time, we too will show no mercy to those who sell the blood of our brethren and parents – this will be a war of life and death!” His speech was followed by five hours of violent protests as stones were hurled at windows of the Knesset, then located on King George Street. Eventually, order was restored, but not before the riots interrupted the plenum debate.
“There are two approaches,” Ben-Gurion, prime minister of the young state, responded in an address to the central committee of his ruling Mapai party. “One is the ghetto Jew’s approach, and the other is of an independent people. I don’t want to run after a German and spit in his face. I don’t want to run after anybody. I want to sit here and build here.”
In the end, the agreement was approved by the Knesset in January 1952 and was signed by West Germany and Israel in September of the same year. But the reparations dispute is still remembered in Israel as one of the most fiery, emotional political debates the nation has ever witnessed.
The initiative to secure German reparations was launched in 1951 at a gathering of 23 major Jewish organizations in New York City, convened by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, then co-chairman of the Jewish Agency and president of the World Jewish Congress. The result was a new organization called the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or simply the “Claims Conference,” which sought “to secure… a small measure of justice for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution… through… disbursing funds to individuals and organizations, and seeking the return of Jewish property lost during the Holocaust.”
The Claims Conference focused on pursuing compensation from Germany and Austria – the core of the Nazi regime. The group played a key role in negotiating the reparations agreement with West Germany and succeeded in reaching a uniquely historic accord between three entities that had not even existed during the war years – the Claims Conference, West Germany and Israel.
In a letter to Dr. Goldmann in 1952, Ben-Gurion noted the significance of the agreement and the work of the Claims Conference.
“For the first time in the history of the Jewish people, oppressed and plundered for hundreds of years… the oppressor and plunderer has had to hand back some of the spoil and pay collective compensation for part of the material losses,” he wrote.
Over the ensuing six decades, the German government has transferred more than $60 billion in satisfaction of claims, and in 2011 alone the Claims Conference allocated approximately $270 million to organizations that assist Jewish survivors in more than 40 countries.
Still, it is estimated that today about one-third of the approximately 200,000 survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line, with many destitute and virtually homeless. The reasons for this sad state of affairs are numerous.
For one, many Holocaust survivors refused to accept German reparation funds as a matter of principle, rejecting it as “blood money” for lost relatives and properties. That is a decision many may now regret.
Other survivors never managed to really recover from the trauma of the Shoah, had trouble holding down jobs due to psychological problems, and have now gone into old age with little or no life savings.
Still others suffer from one or more serious illnesses that often date back to the severe malnourishment they suffered as Jewish children growing up in Nazi-occupied Europe. Their soaring medical bills are driving them into insolvency.
Some survivors had spouses that have now passed away, and the loss of their monthly pension income is felt in the household budget.
Finally, state pensions in Israel provide for the elderly but they cannot keep up with the rising costs of living here.
As a result, the government and private charities are stepping up efforts to assist destitute Holocaust survivors.
The state, for instance, has increased the monthly pensions for qualified survivors and offered subsidies on utility bills and other routine living costs.
But many survivors are house-bound and off the radar screens. According to Aviva Silberman, a legal expert and director of the non-profit organization Spring for Holocaust Survivors (Aviv Lenitzolei Hashoa in Hebrew), many survivors are either not receiving the full benefits to which they are entitled or are not even aware they are eligible for more.
Together with her husband, Silberman founded the Spring for Holocaust Survivors organization in 2007 to help improve the lives of survivors in Israel. In particular, her volunteer teams canvass neighborhoods and retirement homes in search of survivors, consult with them about what assistance they are receiving and help them apply for any unclaimed benefits.
The difficulty for many survivors is not the lack of available funding but, rather, the convoluted bureaucracy that makes understanding which benefits they are entitled to almost impossible. It is estimated that over NIS 250 million ($87 million) designated to help Holocaust survivors in Israel goes unclaimed each year.
Although Silberman does not believe all of the problems facing Holocaust survivors are solvable, her organization has been improving the situation one survivor at a time. She mentioned one woman she recently assisted who is now receiving NIS 3,000 ($770) more per month.
Many other such efforts are underway across Israel, such as the new assistedliving facility in Haifa, set aside exclusively for destitute Holocaust survivors, run by Yad Ezer L’Haver and funded by the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. The “warm home” now has over 100 residents, including many survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and provides for all their lodging and meals along with free medical and dental care.
Yet the challenge of impoverished Holocaust survivors in Israel is daunting and extremely urgent. Today, 88 percent of the survivors in Israel are over 75 years of age, while nearly onethird (60,000) of them live in poverty.
On average, 12,800 die each year, or 35 per day. By 2015, over 66% will be 80 years of age or older. And as they age, their medical and financial needs substantially increase.
One new effort that could make a substantial difference in the lives of these needy Holocaust survivors is the Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce, or “Project HEART” (www.heartwebsite.org). Launched in the spring of 2011, this initiative works under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Office and in cooperation with the Jewish Agency, with a broad mandate distinct from previous Holocaust restitution agencies.
First, Project HEART aims to seek a measure of justice for all Nazi victims and their heirs worldwide, not just those in Israel.
Second, its target is all property previously owned by Jews during the Holocaust era, not property limited to Germany or Austria.
Third, its funding comes from Israeli taxpayers rather than drawing upon funds recovered as Holocaust reparations.
And fourth, it seeks to transfer reparations directly to individual claimants rather than to the State of Israel.
“The problem is biggest here [in Israel] and our aim is to help survivors and heirs receive justice,” explained Bobby Brown, director of Project HEART. But he added that while the Claims Conference focused primarily on Germany, most of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were from eastern European countries, whose governments have never paid reparations.
Project HEART is tackling the problem in two stages. The first stage involves the compilation of questionnaires and lists of claims. Currently, they are receiving 1,000 claims forms from survivors and/or victims’ heirs per week, and are nearing 145,000 completed questionnaires from all over the world that will help to determine the eligibility of applicants.
The main target of Project HEART is private property of all kinds, including immovable property such as real estate, movable property like art or jewelry, and intangible personal property, such as stocks, insurance policies and savings accounts.
For example, in Poland alone Project HEART has 35,000 claims, including credible claims that the land on which Oskar Schindler’s factories operated were once owned by Jews. One Jewish family owned 40% of the stock in what today is one of Poland’s largest and most successful pharmaceutical companies. The Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of sprawling barracks built on Polish land annexed by the Nazis and owned by a Jewish family.
Elsewhere, a Jewish person owned the property on which the parliament buildings of a certain unnamed country sit today.
To help individuals gain restitution for property that was confiscated, looted, or forcibly sold during the era of the Shoah, Project HEART has created a large, publicly available and searchable database of properties. The database, which they intend to give to Yad Vashem for historical documentation purposes, currently contains more than 2.2 million properties in its online archive, worth billions of dollars.
“It is incomplete, but it provides a good place to start to share information and help determine one’s potential eligibility,” Brown recently told The Christian Edition.
In stage two, Project HEART will represent individuals and their claims before the respective governments, agencies and private institutions, such as insurance companies, banks and civil authorities. They hope to find solutions through the use of a wide range of tools, create public discourse through publications that educate the public on Project HEART’s goals, and build communities of grassroots movements that positively influence lawmakers to propose legislation that will make reparations directly to claimants rather than to the State of Israel.
Surprisingly, as Project HEART has unfolded phase one since its inception last year, they have discovered that Christian communities are their natural allies. One Christian donor provided $700,000 for a moving billboard advertisement in Times Square to get the word out on Project HEART’s efforts.
A young female undergraduate student from Liberty University, a private Christian institution in Lynchburg, Virginia, is spending her summer as a volunteer with the organization researching invaluable information as Project HEART begins implementing phase two.
Brown is highly appreciative of the Christian support the project has received so far and is reaching out to broaden this support base, as several Christian ministries have become official advocates of Project HEART.
In assessing the reasons for the Christian community’s positive response to his overtures, Brown believes it is their shared desire for justice for the survivors, wedded to finding practical solutions that will realize that goal.