A recent report on israelinsider.com says that a third of Holocaust survivors in Israel live in poverty:
Some 80,000 of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living under the poverty line, according to the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund, Ynetnews reported. That is almost a third of all Holocaust survivors in Israel.
Many of them suffer from severe mental and medical problems due to the hardships and torture many of them experienced during World War II. Dental, hearing and visual problems are common among Holocaust survivors.
Almost three-quarters of the survivors (73 percent) are over the age of 76, and about a fifth are older than 86. 50,000 to 60,000 survivors are in need of nursing care.
The Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund assists only about 30,000 survivors due to budgetary restraints, although twice that number need care.
The Fund is hoping to boost government support and secure a $100 million budget, which would ensure that all survivors’ basic needs are provided for.
This poverty in Israel saddens me, but I don’t recommend wasting efforts trying to boost government support. Instead, we as a global community need to work together in non-governmental organizations. We need to base this voluntarily cooperative organizations not on nationalism, but rather on a human unity that overcomes race, religion and nationality. Corrupt negligent governments, greedy international mega corporations, and non-meritocratic social inequality cause undeserved poverty not only in Israel, but also in all regions that affects all people, including native Palestinians. Unfortunately, nationalism causes these peoples to fight each other, their peers. As a result, both Palestinian and Israeli innocent civilians and children die from wars between the two camps as well as poverty.