Holocaust Survivors Blast $20 Stipend
JERUSALEM (AP) — 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.”
[…]
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.
[…]
Roet said the average stipend for survivors in Holland, where he was born, is between $2,740 and $4,110 a month.
[…]
Critics maintain that more of the nearly $80 billion in reparations Israel has received in compensation from Germany should have gone to the survivors. […]
Source:
LAURIE COPANS
Associated Press Writer
Associated Press Correspondent David McHugh contributed to this report from Berlin.
Jul 31 04:24 PM US/Eastern
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