Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met earlier this week with Holocaust Survivor groups following a campaign by the media and Labor Party officials to increase aid to Israel’s remaining living Survivors.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a meeting with representatives of Holocaust survivor groups, agreed to provide so-called "first circle survivors” with a monthly stipend of 1,200 shekels ($285). “First-circle survivors” are defined as those who were sent to concentration camps, as opposed to “Second Circle,” who escaped the Nazis. No agreement has been reached on the amount of aid granted to those in the latter group.
Labor MK Ofir Pines-Paz attacked the offer from the Knesset plenum Tuesday, saying that, “If Anne Frank were alive today, she would not be eligible for government aid based on the requirements.”
The Prime Minister’s Office then dispatched a strongly-worded press release, saying: “It seems as though MK Ofir Pines's need to attack the government has caused him to set new records, previously unknown to the Israeli political system and the Knesset. We are saddened to see that in the Jewish State, of all places, a Knesset Member makes such underhanded use of Anne Frank's name for the sake of satisfying his own political needs."
The release also pointed out that Frank was eventually sent to Auschwitz and then the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, rendering Pines-Paz’s entire argument biographically flawed as well. Anne Frank, the PMO release claims, would have received aid through three separate avenues: 1) through a law granting aid to survivors who arrived prior to 1953, 2) through German reparation paid to survivors who arrived after 1953 and 3) through another German settlement in the 90s.
Olmert aides told Army Radio that the issuance of the press release was necessary "in order to prevent the public discourse from sinking to shameful levels of beastly behavior.”
Pines-Paz was quick to respond, saying: "A bestial offense is the best defense. [Olmert] knows full well that what I was referring to by using the example of Anne Frank was the hundreds and thousands of children who hid away during the Holocaust; those who were rescued and were never caught or sent to the annihilation camps." Pines-Paz said those children would no longer be eligible for aid under Olmert’s plan.
MK Collette Avital, another Labor MK who has been active on behalf of financial aid to Holocaust survivors, came to Pines-Paz’s defense, saying that though Frank would have received aid from Holland, Israel “would have given her nothing because she was not in the camps or ghettos.”
“We don’t need any charity. We need for these people to be able to live at the end of their life with some kind of dignity,” MK Avital told Al-Jazeera. “The problem [i.e. the Holocaust –ed.] was not caused by the State of Israel, but the State of Israel bears a responsibility to its citizens.”
The story first hit the headlines this past Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), when Israel’s largest daily newspapers highlighted what they said was rampant poverty among Holocaust survivors living in Israel. The story was picked up and reported widely by major European wire services and the state-run Arabic media, as well as the Sunni Arab-run Al-Jazeera English News Channel. The story was greeted with comments by forum members and talkbackists drawing the conclusion that Israel was a more evil empire than that of the Third Reich.