‘A shame and an insult’ after report on needy survivors

Politicians are weighing in on a report that shows high numbers of Holocaust survivors living in poverty in Israel and calling for reforms to solve the problem.

“Just sad,” Labor MK Itzik Shmuli writes on Facebook, lashing out at the previous government for failing to come to aid of survivors barely eking out an existence. “This is my country and it is its responsibility to solve this problem once and for all via a clear, short and simple law that will give respectable grants in coordination with the report on the survivors.”

Labor Party head Isaac Herzog calls the report’s findings “a shame and an insult, no less,” and says the government could have avoided the situation by giving survivors the money that was earmarked for isolated West Bank settlements instead.

“I lower my eyes in shame toward the 189,000 Holocaust survivors who live in Israel,” he writes on Facebook. “If a quarter of them are forced to forgo medication, and a third are unable to heat their homes, it’s not just a large disgrace for Jewish, Israeli and human ethics, but also mainly a reminder of the problematic order of preferences that the State of Israel has worked under for years.”

Likud MK Avi Dichter, who has spent the last two years heading the survivors’ welfare fund that released the report, says that more money is now going to survivors but still more needs to be done.

“To Holocaust survivors who turn to me and say ‘let us die with dignity,’ I say I have a different motto. My motto is to worry that they are able to live with dignity,” he writes.