Many aging survivors of the Holocaust of World War II marked Israel’s memorial day for the victims of the Nazis with increasing anger toward the agency that is supposed to be helping them.
The annual Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Day began yesterday at sundown with a ceremony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial authority.
For more than five decades, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — better known as the Claims Conference — has been the central channel for billions of dollars in restitution and reparations payments from Germany to Jewish victims of the Third Reich.
Today, 63 years after Allied troops freed the emaciated prisoners who survived the Nazi death camps, the agency has become the target of increasingly strident criticism. Some survivors charge it with amassing excessive wealth in their name while forgetting the very people it is meant to serve, many of whom are growing old in poverty.
More than anything, critics say far too much money is going to projects like Holocaust museums and broader Jewish causes instead of to making survivors’ lives better in the time they have left.
“Open your pocketbooks now. Don’t worry about monuments. You’ll have plenty left for monuments when the survivors are gone,” said Jack Rubin, 79, of Boynton Beach, Florida.
Rubin is a retired Connecticut furrier born in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1944, when he was 15, the Nazis sent him and his family to the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the train arrived at the camp in southern Poland, he was separated from his parents and grandparents and never saw them again. US troops liberated him in the spring of the following year.
“There is nothing more important than the Holocaust survivors, and in the few years they have left they should live in dignity,” Rubin said. “That is all I ask of the Claims Conference.”
About 6 million Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators in World War II. Today, there are an estimated half a million Holocaust survivors worldwide, roughly half in Israel and the rest mainly in the US and the countries of the former Soviet Union. At least tens of thousands of them are poor. For these people, the Claims Conference is the primary — and sometimes the only — address for aid.
The current dispute involves money the group received from selling unclaimed Jewish properties in the former East Germany, which it inherited by law after Germany was reunited.
Today, the Claims Conference says it distributes around US$120 million a year from that money. Eighty percent goes to survivors and institutions that help them, and the rest goes to Holocaust education and memorials like Yad Vashem.
But the group’s critics say it must urgently put aside everything else and focus solely on making survivor’s lives better before time runs out.
Responding, Reuven Merhav, a retired Israeli Mossad agent and diplomat who now serves voluntarily as one of the Claims Conference’s top officials, said educating the world about the Holocaust is no less urgent than direct aid to survivors — it has to be done while survivors are still around to tell their story.
“The money spent on education and commemoration makes a great impact, and would not make much of a difference to anyone if it were split among tens of thousands of survivors,” Merhav said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the