The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) announced the outcomes of their negotiations with the German Federal Ministry of Finance on behalf of Holocaust survivors living globally. The results include a €105 million ($114 million USD) increase in funding for social welfare services. This brings the total budget for social welfare services to €893.9 million ($972.5 million USD), nearly $2 billion in funding from 2025 through 2026. Additionally, there is an increase of €51million ($55 million USD) for Holocaust education through 2028, bringing the total for Holocaust education funding to €164 million ($177 million USD) over the next four years.

Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, said, "As Holocaust survivors age and their care is more complex, we see a need for increased social welfare services globally. It is imperative that we keep the promises we made to survivors after the Holocaust: We must ensure they are able to live their final years in dignity. We must work to guarantee they have the services and care they require. And, in this time of growing Holocaust denial and distortion, it is critical that we secure a robust foundation for Holocaust education to ensure current and future generations alike have access and opportunities to truly understand the lessons of the Holocaust. Only then can we be sure our past does not become our future. Only then can we say, 'Never again.'"

Surveys conducted this year in the United States, Canada, Austria, France, England, and the Netherlands, among others, reveal a decline in awareness and knowledge about the Holocaust. Schools worldwide have expressed a desire for education on the subject.

Social welfare services, including home care, are provided through the Claims Conference's network of more than 300 social welfare agency partners across 83 countries. Social welfare agencies engage directly with Holocaust survivors, ensuring their individual needs are met, including home care, food packages, medical needs, transportation to appointments, and socialization. Although the total number of Holocaust survivors is decreasing overall, those who remain alive require more care. These services are all essential to this last generation of Holocaust survivors.

The post Holocaust survivors to get boost of €105M appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

A new Claims Conference demographic report on Holocaust survivors around the world shows that there are currently only about 245,000 Holocaust survivors alive. According to the first-of-its-kind report, they are dispersed into more than 90 countries around the world, with 49% residing in Israel.

The report, published ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day this coming Saturday and described by the organization as an 'unprecedented demographic report', breaks down the various locations they are in, as well as their countries of origin, needs, demographic data, and more.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

"The largest number of survivors – 119,300, representing nearly half (49%) of all survivors worldwide – reside in Israel. This figure is less than the 147,199 reported by the State of Israel's Holocaust Survivors' Rights Authority on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023,4 which included both Holocaust survivors as well as those whom Israel recognizes as victims of antisemitic persecutions during the war," the report notes. Some 44,200 are in North America (including 38,400 in the US) and about 2,500 in Australia.

In Western Europe, the report shows, there are 48,200 Holocaust survivors, including 21,900 in France and 14,200 in Germany. In Central European countries, there are some 6,100. In the former Soviet Union, there are  28,900 Holocaust survivors – 18,200 in Russia, 7,400 in Ukraine, and 2,100 in Belarus.

The report also shows the median age of Holocaust survivors today is 86, ranging between 77 to over 100 years old (the oldest was born in 1910). It also shows that 95%  were children during the Holocaust. Women make up the majority among Holocaust survivors (61%).

As a result of the Claims Conference's successful negotiations with the German government over the years, nearly 40% of survivors receive monthly payments while the rest are eligible for one-time or annual payments. Since 1951, the Claims Conference has secured over $90 billion in indemnification for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust for suffering and losses resulting from persecution by the Nazis, including through one-time payments and – for those most in need – life-sustaining services, such as home care, medicine, hot meals, and friendly support networks, the Claims Conference said. "The Claims Conference administers several compensation funds that provide direct payments to survivors globally and issues grants to over 300 social service agencies worldwide that provide welfare services and help address the needs of the aging, vulnerable population of survivors," it added.

About 20% of Holocaust survivors are over 90 years old and require social assistance. Some 40% of survivors are receiving or received in the past year social welfare services provided by over 300 agencies that receive grants administered by the Claims Conference.

According to the Claims Conference Executive Vice President Greg Schneider, The numbers in this report are interesting, but it is also important to look past the numbers to see the individuals they represent. These are Jews who were born into a world that wanted to see them murdered. They endured the atrocities of the Holocaust in their youth and were forced to rebuild an entire life out of the ashes of the camps and ghettos that ended their families and communities. The data forces us to accept the reality that Holocaust survivors won't be with us forever, indeed, we have already lost most survivors."

The president of the organization, Gideon Taylor added,  "The data we have amassed, not only tells us how many and where survivors are, it clearly indicates that most survivors are at a period of life where their need for care and services is growing. Now is the time to double down on our attention on this waning population. Now is when they need us the most."

Dani Dayan, the Chairman of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, said, "I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Claims Conference for compiling this crucial report about Holocaust survivors today. This demographic study is a warning to me, highlighting the current demographic state of Holocaust survivors globally. It underlines the urgency of our work to continue gathering and researching the testimonies and names of these remarkable individuals before the survivor generation disappears. May their presence continue to strengthen our resolve to shape a better future."

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

The post Claims Conference releases 'unprecedented' report on Holocaust survivors appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

More than half of all people in the United Kingdom did not know that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during World War II, according to the findings of a new survey published Wednesday.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

A majority, 52%, of UK respondents were unaware of the most cited death toll from the Nazi German genocide of Europe's Jews, and 22% of Brits thought that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed, the survey found.

The survey, conducted, by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based group that seeks compensation and restitution for Holocaust survivors and their families, was released to coincide with the 83rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass pogrom that targeted Jews in a series of attacks throughout Germany and Austria on the night of November 9, 1938.

"We are very concerned to see the profound gaps in knowledge of the Holocaust in this and previous studies, including about events connected to the UK," said Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor said.

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

The vast majority of respondents - 88% - said that it was important to continue to teach people about the genocide of Europe's Jews, in part so that it never happens again. Seventy-one percent said the government should support Holocaust education.

Fifty-six percent of respondents said they thought something like the Holocaust could happen again.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

The post Survey finds most Brits unaware Nazis killed 6 million Jews in Holocaust appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The organization that handles claims on behalf of Jews who suffered under the Nazis said Wednesday that Germany has agreed to extend compensation to Jewish survivors who endured the World War II siege of Leningrad and two other groups who had not received any monthly pensions from Germany.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

The payments will be going to approximately 6,500 survivors around the world, primarily in Israel, North America, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.

The new funds are targeted toward about 4,500 Jews who survived the Leningrad siege during World War II, about 800 who lived mostly in hiding in France during the Nazi's terror reign, and some 1,200 Jewish survivors from Romania.

All of them will start getting a lifelong, monthly pension of 375 euros ($435) retroactively from July on.

"This was a landmark breakthrough," Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, said of the newly negotiated compensation arrangement with the German government.

"For many of these people, it's the difference between deciding to pay the rent for the month or the medicines or buying food," Schneider said in a telephone interview from New York with The Associated Press.

One of recipients of the new monthly pension is Nonna Revzina, a 85-year-old woman who now lives in a Jewish senior citizen home in Berlin.

The retired librarian still remembers the beginning of the Leningrad siege by the Nazis in September 1941, when she was five years old. She still trembles when she recalls how she watched the events unfold from the sixth floor of her tenement building, when the city came under bombardment from Nazi forces, supply lines were cut off and hundreds of thousands died.

During an interview with the AP in her one-room apartment, Revzina wiped off her tears as she talked about her father, who died of hunger and illness during the siege in 1942, and whose body her mother took away on a sled to a place nearby where hundreds of dead bodies were piled up. She still does not know where her father was buried.

The siege of Leningrad, the Russian city now called St. Petersburg, lasted nearly 2½ years until the Soviet Army drove away the Germans on Jan. 27, 1944.

Estimates of the death toll vary, but historians agree that more than 1 million Leningrad residents died from hunger or air and artillery bombardments during the siege.

"But in addition to all of that, there were extra measures that the Germans did against Jews," Schneider said, such as the Nazis dropping leaflets into the city urging residents to identify Jews and throw them out or sending spies into the city to try create riots and then blaming that on the Jews.

"In the midst of this huge military battle, the Nazis were thinking not only about the Russians, not only about conquering Leningrad, but they were actually thinking about how to destroy the Jews and kill the Jews who were living in the city," Schneider said.

Revzina said she was well aware that "had the Nazis conquered the city, all of us Jews would have been murdered immediately."

The Russian woman immigrated to Germany in 1996, where her two adult children had moved a few years before her. In Berlin, Revzina helped raise her three grandchildren.

With the end of World War II now 76 years ago, Holocaust survivors are all elderly, and because many were deprived of proper nutrition when they were young today they suffer from numerous medical issues. In addition, many live isolated lives having lost their families in the war and also have a psychological burden due to their persecution under the Nazis.

Many Holocaust survivors came out of the war with nothing and are still impoverished today.

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

Part of the Claims Conference's annual negotiations includes working with Germany to expand the number of people eligible for compensation.

Some of the 6,500 survivors who will start getting pensions now already received one-time payments in the past but that will not bar them from receiving the new benefits, the Claims Conference said.

Since 1952, the German government has paid about $90 billion to individuals for suffering and losses resulting from persecution by the Nazis. In 2021, the Claims Conference will distribute approximately $625 million in direct compensation to over 260,000 survivors in 83 countries and will allocate approximately $640 million in grants to over 300 social service agencies worldwide that provide services for Holocaust survivors.

For Revzina, another 375 euros a month will allow her to enjoy the small pleasures of life that she wasn't able to afford.

"The pension is very helpful for me," she said. "I like going to cafes. I can do that more often now."

Her granddaughter Lana Solovej was thrilled about the new pension.

"This is great news for her," said the 23-year-old university student, who often helps her grandmother with daily household errands. "The new pension will make a great difference for my grandmother."

The post Thousands more Holocaust survivors awarded monthly pensions appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who on Thursday took a stringent position against a Polish bill to limit the restitution of property stolen from Polish Jews, continued to press the Polish government on Sunday, urging Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to "check the facts."

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

Morawiecki said earlier Sunday that as long as he was prime minister, Poland "would certainly not pay for the Germans' crimes: not a zloty, not a euro, and not a dollar."

Lapid responded by pointing out that "Millions of Jews were murdered on Polish soil and no legislation will wipe out their memory. We don't care about the Polish money. This hints at antisemitism."

"We are battling for the memory of the Holocaust victims, the pride of our people, and we will not allow any parliament to pass laws the purpose of which is to deny the Holocaust," Lapid said.

On Sunday, Polish Ambassador to Israel Marek Magierowski received a summons to meet with the head of the Foreign Ministry's political department, Alon Bar, over the Polish draft bill.

According to a Foreign Ministry communique, Bar expressed Israel's extreme disappointment that the legislation had passed the lower house and warned Magierowski that if it became law, it would have an adverse effect on Polish-Israeli relations.

Bar told the Polish envoy that Israel's objection to the bill had nothing to do with any ideological debate about responsibility for the Holocaust, but was anchored in Poland's responsibility to its former citizens whose property had been stolen.

After the meeting, Magierowski tweeted that he had tried to "redress the misunderstandings and calm the waters" by explaining the Polish Code of Administrative Procedure to the Israeli public.

Chairman of the Claims Conference Gideon Taylor said his organization was "very disappointed" by the response of Polish officials, including Prime Minister Morawiecki, to the Jewish world's response to the draft legislation.

"As we have already told the Polish government, the draft bill deals with confiscations that were carried out by the communist authorities after the war and are not related to the terrible crimes the Germans perpetrated in Poland during the war," Taylor said.

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

The post FM Lapid: Polish property restitution bill hints at antisemitism appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

An 86-year-old man in Moscow described being forced by Nazi occupiers into a ghetto as a child. Elderly survivors in New York shared stories Sunday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

They worry that today's youth in many countries don't recognize names of Nazi death camps, fall prey to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, or don't realize that 6 million Jews were killed in Hitler's World War II extermination campaign.

Lighting the Hanukkah candelabra, France's chief rabbi, Haim Korsia, told survivors in Paris, "What you are, each of you, is exactly like the light. ... We will never put out the first flame. When we transmit the knowledge, your experience and when we transmit it to others, it takes nothing from us and it gives to others."

With folk dancing, festive songs and shared meals, the ceremonies Sunday and Monday also aimed to combat the solitude and other difficulties many survivors face in old age.

Some 400,000 Holocaust victims are estimated to still be alive, about half of them in Israel – and as many as 40% are living in poverty, said Ruediger Mahlo of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which organized the events.

"We want to make this public in order to help them and in order that other people help them as well," he told The Associated Press.

With tears in their eyes, survivors sang Israel's national anthem together at the Western Wall, the holiest site in the world where Jews can pray. The mood turned joyous by the time candles were lit, with survivors joining hands, dancing in circles and laughing.

"For me, the holiday of Hanukkah is a holiday of victory, and it's very important for me to see the light of victory," said Amnon Elkiev, a survivor originally from the Netherlands who came to the ceremony with his wife.

Renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld was among those attending a bittersweet ceremony in Paris, where young and old sang and prayed together.

Anna Sterman described being "hunted ... like mice" as a child near Lyon. Sarah Saragoussi, whose parents were deported to camps, said: "We thought they would come back nonetheless. We didn't think they were leaving to their deaths."

The gathering in New York included some 200 survivors, some wearing winter caps, others wearing kippot. Some smiled as they listened to speeches; others looked on pensively. They touched on recent anti-Semitic attacks in the US and on concerns that younger generations of Americans know little about what they went through.

Hand-in-hand with a rabbi, survivor Mikhail Spektr said a prayer and lit a Hanukkah menorah in Moscow. He then took the microphone and sang for members of Russia's Jewish community, accompanied by a fiddler and accordion player.

As a child when the war began, Spektr said, he didn't realize what was going on.

When the Nazis came, he recalled his grandfather telling him that they were "a civilized nation, they wouldn't do anything to us."

But he and his family were taken to a ghetto on Ukraine's western edge and held there from 1941 until the Red Army liberated it in 1944.

"We were all sleeping on the floor. We lived on the territory [of the ghetto], isolated from the city by barbed wire. The entrance was guarded by Nazi soldiers and policemen," he said. "People who dared [to leave] were indeed shot."

Bearing witness is ever more important as survivors die out. French survivor Suzanne Bakon said, "We are doing everything while we are living so that [the memory] remains."

The post From New York to Moscow, Holocaust survivors share memories appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.