On 11 May, the first day of the Pope’s trip to Israel, he made a visit to Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial and museum. Every word, nuance and intonation of his speech there was analysed, and the consensus was that Benedict XVI was not sufficiently humble and apologetic. The occasion demanded more, and the German pontiff simply failed to live up to expectation.
Every head of state or dignitary who wishes to visit the Holy Land officially must attend Yad Vashem and go through this ritual, though contrition is not always required. Recently, however, the place has acquired another function. Shortly before the papal visit, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu chose Yad Vashem to make a high-profile political speech. “We will not allow Holocaust deniers to threaten another genocide of the Jewish people,” he thundered. It was a clear reference to the Iranian prime minister, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a thinly veiled indication of Netanyahu’s inclination to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations. All, of course, in the name of the Holocaust.
The speech was reported by Haaretz. On the same page there was a second story reporting that, out of 8,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel and eligible for special compensation under a law passed in 2007, 6,000 so far had received nothing. The entitlement, which is only for those who suffered long-term damage to their health in death camps, forced labour camps and ghettoes, and have never received substantial or regular compensation, is a miserly 1,000 new Israeli shekels (roughly £150) a month, albeit backdated to when the law was enacted.
Yet, despite the meagreness of the pension and the small number of those entitled to it, few receive anything at all. Yossef Moskowitz is 79 years old, and has been denied the pension because the relevant committee decided that his three years of hard labour under the Germans did not constitute “hard labour in a labour camp”. Ruth Epstein, 84, suffers from osteoporosis and a perforated disc following several operations for cancer. She received a one-off German payment for “wearers of the Yellow Star of David”, but her application for the new monthly pension was turned down. Helena Rabson, 75, has a court order requiring the payments to be made, but the Israeli finance ministry is not impressed, and still she gets nothing.
Before he was forced to resign in the face of a variety of corruption charges last year, Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert appointed a highly respected retired Supreme Court judge, Dalia Dorner, to lead an official commission to examine the issue of the Holocaust survivors. Dorner quickly concluded that the allocations given to the survivors must be linked to 75 per cent of the allowance paid by Germany to Israel for each survivor. Olmert immediately buried her findings.
His successor, Binyamin Netanyahu, has so far done nothing to improve the situation.
The Israeli government had another good reason to ignore the eminent judge. The Dorner Commission’s report shockingly revealed that little more than half the tens of billions paid by Germany to the state of Israel, under an agreement made in 1952, had actually reached the survivors it was meant to compensate. Successive governments had quietly trousered the rest. Moreover, the state defied – and continues to defy – a Supreme Court ruling from 1996 which ordered the government to increase survivors’ payouts to match the sum paid by Germany. So, having robbed them of billions, the state refuses to give the wretched survivors back even a fraction of what it stole without first making them jump through hoops to claim it.
What makes it all the more appalling is that Israel arguably owes its very existence to the Holocaust. Were it not for the killing of the six million and the creation of hundreds of thousands of stateless survivors/refugees, it is doubtful whether the UN would have voted to establish the state of Israel in November 1947, especially given that the place was not exactly vacant at the time.
I myself first confronted this lamentable state of affairs at the end of 2006 when I went to Israel, where I had grown up. The country’s finance minister then was Avraham Hirschsohn (who has since also resigned amid allegations of corruption). While in opposition, Hirschsohn promised the survivors that he would stop at nothing to help them. But he changed his tune once elected, and even failed to implement allowances that had already been approved by the Knesset.
While at Yad Vashem, the Pope will have seen for himself that, although some of the survivors are living on the breadline, money is no object for the Holocaust commemoration industry. There are now about 60 Holocaust museums scattered across the world: nearly one for every 100 poverty-stricken survivors. Perhaps this is why one of them said to me: “Alive, we are a nuisance; dead, we are an asset. They just want us to die as quickly as possible so that they can get on with commemorating us lavishly – with our own money.”
Mira Bar-Hillel grew up in Israel and was the country’s first female radio news reporter
