- Feb 10, 2000
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From Yahoo!/AP:
What a strange story. I'm not sure what to make of it - obviously these people were freed, at a minimum, 62 years ago, but it does seem to me that Israel of all places should be highly motivated to give them a dignified existence, and a program that gives them $240 a year seems worse than useless.
JERUSALEM - An Israeli government offer of a new $20 monthly stipend for Holocaust survivors provoked outrage Tuesday, with survivors charging the meager allowance will do nothing to make up for years of neglect of the 240,000 Israelis who lived through Nazi horrors.
Survivors have long claimed that European countries treat them far better than Israel, where many elderly survivors live in poverty. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's announcement of the new allowance did nothing to change that impression. One survivor called the offer "absurd and insulting."
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Many survivors were outraged. "This doesn't solve anything," said survivor Avraham Roet, 79. "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," he told The Associated Press.
The new payment is in addition to government support already given to survivors, including those deemed physically or psychologically handicapped, and regular pension payments of about $487 a month.
Survivors groups charged ? in what was meant to be an especially painful dig at the Israeli government ? that survivors are treated better in Germany.
"We know what the conditions of the Holocaust survivors are in Holland, France, Germany and Poland. They are much better than in Israel," Noah Frug, chairman of a consortium of Holocaust survivors' organizations and a survivor himself, told Israel Radio.
Hillary Kessler-Godin, spokeswoman for Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said Germany still pays monthly pensions to 80,000 survivors around the world, after starting in the 1950s.
"Each survivor's pension can be different depending on their persecution history," she told the AP. Other funds have paid out billions of dollars to various categories of Nazi victims.
Roet said the average stipend for survivors in Holland, where he was born, is between $2,740 and $4,110 a month.
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What a strange story. I'm not sure what to make of it - obviously these people were freed, at a minimum, 62 years ago, but it does seem to me that Israel of all places should be highly motivated to give them a dignified existence, and a program that gives them $240 a year seems worse than useless.