From Holocaust horrors to shameful poverty
Op-ed: Once a year, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we like to embrace our Shoah survivors, 50,000 of whom still live below poverty line.
Her children and husband were murdered in Bergen-Belsen, but one of her daughters immigrated to Israel in the 1930s and was married to the Dutch consul in Palestine. That consul is my grandfather, and he is the one who included his mother-in-law's name in a swap deal with the Nazis. Templers in exchange for a handful of favored Jews.
If I'll try to maintain some humor, and it's not easy when it comes to the Holocaust, my grandfather was righteous person. After all, what would you call a person who consciously released his mother-in-law and brought her to live in his home?
Grandma Judith, who was 1.50 meters tall, was according to my mother's stories quite a bit of a tyrant and lived in Israel to be more than 90 years old, which teaches us once again that human nature clings strongly to life.
Judith, who was already an elderly woman when she arrived in Israel, didn't want for nothing in her daughter and son-in-law's home. She, unlike other survivors, didn't have to worry about medications and food. As I said, she had connections.
There are quite a few Holocaust survivors living in Israel, who we like to embrace metaphorically when Holocaust Remembrance Day arrives. They have no connections in Israel's corridors of power, and quite a few of them live in shameful poverty. There is nothing new here.
The public has been exposed to the survivors' stories of hardship for years, and it seems that the poverty is becoming fixated as a predestination, and as part of the Holocaust stories. Today's children might still think that a difficult economic situation is a natural sequence of the horrors of the Holocaust, because at least according to protocol, the State of Israel has enacted laws in favor of the survivors and voluntary organizations have made it their goal to ensure the implementation of their rights.
And yet, 66 years after the State's establishment, 50,000 Holocaust survivors still live below the poverty line.
One of the questions raised occasionally by naïve and curious youth is what was done with the reparations money; those controversial funds Germany handed over to Israel as symbolic compensation for the horrors of the Holocaust. The answer is divided between a history lesson and an economics lesson, as this agreement was considered one of the significant steps which made it possible for the Israeli economy to grow in the 1950s. Among other things, Israel used the reparations money to purchase ships, raw materials, agricultural equipment and industrial equipment.
So it is quite possible that one of the conclusions the students will draw from the lesson is that the State of Israel grew also thanks to the Holocaust survivors, and some would say - at their expense.
The question of what the State is doing as part of its commitment to care for the Holocaust survivors will likely not be raised during civic classes, because pensions and bureaucracy are not a matter for children, and nor are the millions the State spends on trips and ceremonies.
And so this year too we'll sanctify the ceremonies and listen to the "never again" speeches, and one eye will peek at the survivors' distress and the other eye will shed tears so that we won't forget the horrors they experienced before becoming poor in their own country.
