TEL AVIV — Melinda Hershkowitz has to choose between buying groceries or medicine that the 83-year-old Holocaust survivor needs to help her sleep at night. That's when flashbacks return of her father being shot dead by a Nazi officer.
“We’ve gone through something that you can’t really describe in words, and then my brother and I waited for years for Romania to allow us to leave to Israel. We dreamt of Israel,” said Hershkowitz, who arrived in 1971. She struggles to meet her monthly expenses after working for 45 years as a cleaner and raising her children in a rundown apartment building in Lod, a gritty city near Tel Aviv that is infamous for gang warfare and a booming drug trade.
Wednesday night is the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day around the world. Israel will mark it with a moment of silence and a two-minute air siren to commemorate the 6 million Jews who perished during World War II in Nazi death camps. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a group of survivors on Wednesday.
But that is not enough for activists who are prodding Israel to remember that 45,000 Holocaust survivors such as Hershkowitz are living below the country’s poverty line and need more assistance.
She and thousands like her witnessed Nazi atrocities in Europe but were prevented from obtaining special help under an Israeli law that until last year had restricted the definition of “survivor” to those who immigrated to Israel before 1953.
Yet even for Yaakov Heiblum, 90, who arrived in 1949, receiving benefits has been emotionally complicated in the Jewish state, which has placed a higher priority on helping war veterans and newer groups of immigrants as the Holocaust survivor population rapidly dwindles to a current 189,000.
Heiblum was born in Starachowice, Poland, and has black tattoos on his arm and chest, remnants of two of the four concentration camps where he spent his teenage years.
But when he arrived in Israel, which had just been created in 1948, “no one was interested in talking about what we went through. Instead, they took me straight from the boat and drafted me into the artillery corps," he recalled.
In the early decades of Israeli history, Holocaust survivors were often regarded with hostility, scorned for their alleged weakness in failing to rebel against the Nazis and given derogatory monikers such as sabon, “soap” in Hebrew, referring to the soap that Nazis made from Jewish corpses, Heiblum said.
In a young Israel, where the focus was on building a powerful nationalist identity, even mentioning the Holocaust was “taboo,” an attitude that persisted in the following decades as the country remained consumed by war and efforts to integrate newer waves of immigrants, Heiblum added.
Most survivors are in their late 80s, but a few are much older, such as Yisrael Kristal, a 112-year-old Haifa resident who is listed by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest man. The group's ranks are quickly declining as more than 13,000 die each year, according to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel.
The mission to enable survivors such as Heiblum "to have dignity in their remaining years is really a race against the clock,” said Aviva Silverman, an attorney specializing in Holocaust rights and founder of the Spring for Holocaust Survivors, a non-profit organization that seeks to inform survivors on their rights to compensation.
Silverman blamed a lack of awareness and a labyrinthine bureaucratic process for depriving tens of thousands of survivors of money they're legally entitled to, especially those without access to the Internet or a lawyer.
Some also had been unwilling to seek assistance, but survivors and their children "have begun to realize that it’s OK to ask for help,” Silverman said.
The Israeli government has attempted to “amend a historical injustice,” according to former finance minister Yair Lapid, who championed a 2014 law ensuring that survivors receive a minimum allotment of $580 a month.
This week, current Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon announced a $90 million plan to increase annual financial support for Holocaust survivors. While the community of survivors is dwindling, “what is not decreasing is our desire to listen to their stories, which are an inseparable part of the country’s founding, as well as our desire to enable them to grow old with dignity,” Kahlon said.
Activists like Silverman hope Israel follows through this time. In the past, as much as $100 million earmarked for survivors hadn't reached them, Welfare Minister Haim Katz recently disclosed.
“Israel has the funds, but it hasn’t been able to get those to the people who most need it,” said Tamara More, CEO of the Association for the Immediate Help of Holocaust Survivors. “Now is already too late for many survivors, and in another few years it will really be too late, but I’m still not optimistic that we’ll really get to see the promises kept that would be necessary to help, and even save lives, of these destitute people.”
Hershkowitz is grateful for the financial and emotional support from volunteers such as More. “At my age I have only the one regret of not being able to give my children a little support,” she said. “But, what can I say. There’s no future ahead.”
