12 February 2008
Tunisian-born Israeli Jews who suffered from the Nazi occupation have won a five-year-long battle to be paid the same Israeli government stipends as European survivors of the Holocaust, according to a court document obtained by the 'Associated Press' news agency. David Etzion, an attorney acting for 19 claimants, said the ruling meant that approximately 20,000 Tunisian Jews who emigrated to Israel were entitled to claim the monthly benefits, which average about US$ 330. German troops occupied Tunisia in November 1942. According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial institution, around 5,000 Jews were rounded up and subjected to forced labor, and 20 Jewish activists were murdered in the Nazi death camps before Allied forces arrived in May 1943. During the six months of Nazi rule in Tunisia, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars on their clothing, many had their property seized and community leaders were arrested, according to Yad Vashem's website. The vast majority of around 100,000 Jews who lived under the Nazi occupation of Tunisia had left the county by the 1960s, mainly to Israel and to former colonial ruler France. Currently, around 1,500 Jews remain in Tunisia.
Many of those who moved to Israel left everything behind, Etzion said, but despite their hardships the Israeli government has maintained they did not qualify for payments from a fund set up from German reparations for Nazi victims because they were not displaced from their homelands. The claimants rejected that explanation, arguing they should be treated the same way as European Jews who received reparations under a German law that provided compensation for those who were unable to flee Nazi persecution to a country of refuge.
