12,000 Needy Survivors in Israel Get Direct Payments of Restitution Funds

Ha'aretz and other news outlets report on the direct payments planned over the next few weeks to indigent survivors in Israel. The $1500 payments are the second such distribution by the "Company for Restitution of Holocaust Victims Assets" -- a quasi-public, non-profit entity set up to "return assets of Holocaust victims to their rightful heirs and use heirless property to help survivors." The funds will have immediate benefits for survivors struggling with healthcare, housing and other urgent needs, who have fallen between the social service cracks. A third of survivors in Israel live in poverty. Some additional funds will be granted to welfare agencies serving poor survivors.

There is a certain refreshing simplicity to this kind of justice -- direct transfer of cash to people in need, without funnelling all the available funds through intermediary agencies. The law establishing the agency stresses aggressive searches for heirs and requires that assistance to survivors takes precedence when heirless funds are distributed. It is arguably more "just" and practical than the problematical Swiss Bank settlement awards (see previous blog post), and the free latitude of the Jewish Claims Conference to distribute restitution funds it controls for purposes far removed from human welfare needs, such as memorials and remembrance projects, including many grants to its own member organizations. Deep dissatisfaction and outright opposition to the old ways of handling unclaimed Holocaust assets and handing out precious funds in part led to the creation of the "Company."

The Israeli process has not been without its own administrative and accountability problems, and the direct payments also reveal the complexity of administratively and legally defining who is a Holocaust survivor. The historical categories are certainly real: those who fled but never directly suffered under the Nazis (mostly older Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union) had a different experience and don't qualify for the payments.

It seems that, in Israel, their poverty requires another approach.