NEW YORK – The World Jewish Congress-US today applauded a bipartisan effort in the US Congress to create a fund to aid the estimated 30,000 impoverished Holocaust survivors living in the United States. The initiative, a letter authorized by Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and signed by more than 50 House members, would include $5 million in the 2015 fiscal-year budget to create the Holocaust Survivor Assistance Fund for poverty stricken survivors living in America, JTA reported.
“We welcome the creation of this fund, which would help individuals who experienced some of the world’s worse barbarism deal with poverty and social isolation in their declining years,” said WJC-US Chairman Rabbi Joel Meyers. “We thank Reps. Wasserman Schultz and Ros-Lehtinen for spearheading the initiative and also the many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who signed on.”
The letter (attached) said that some 113,000 Holocaust survivors live in the US and that an estimated 30,000 of them lived in poverty. Their average age is 82, but nearly one-quarter are age 85 or older.
“As a group, Holocaust survivors are at increased risk of depression, social isolation, and extremely poor outcomes associated with institutionalization, which can be emotionally and physically devastating for Survivors as a trigger of the traumas of forced institutionalizations and relocations during the Holocaust,” Wasserman Schultz and Ros-Lehtinen wrote, adding, “Without immediate action on behalf of these survivors, we risk losing them to the very things they should never have to face again – eviction, hunger, inadequate medical care, loneliness, social isolation, and despair.”
