The Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel has released the latest statistics on Shoah survivors in Israel. The numbers show that over the past five years, the number of survivors receiving aid from the Foundation climbed by 160%, from 23,000 to 60,000.
This, despite the fact that 56,000 survivors died during this period, leaving 208,000 today.
The Foundation’s annual budget currently stands at 425 million shekels, compared with 166 million five years ago. The Foundation acknowledges that these numbers are due to the “significant increase” in government funding for this purpose.
It is expected that the number of needy victims will continue to climb, due to their increasing ages. The Foundation says it continues to work together with other bodies to find solutions for their needs.
Foundation Chairman Elazar Stern, a former IDF Chief Education Officer, said, “In recent years, the State of Israel has made great strides on behalf of the needy victims, who receive today much more than they did in the past.”
“While the world marks International Holocaust Day [Jan. 27],” Stern said, “we must do everything to continue giving more support to the survivors – firstly in terms of material help, but just as much by giving them a supportive framework. We must be a ‘light unto the Jews’ even before we are a ‘light unto the nations,’ in order that there will not be even one survivor in Israel who does not receive his essential needs.”
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called upon the international community to learn the lessons of the inaction during the Holocaust and to take action this time against Iran, the latest to threaten a Jewish genocide. In a speech in the Knesset on Wednesday, Netanyahu noted repeated threats to destroy Israel by Iranian leaders, as well as their denial of the extent of the Holocaust. World leaders “knew and did not act," Netanyahu said. "Today they know, they hear, they see, they film. Will they act, will they speak, really speak, attack or condemn?"
Education Minister Gideon Saar, speaking at a memorial ceremony at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Wednesday, said that just as the Torah commands us not to forget how Amalek attacked the Jewish People on their way out of Egypt, "the universal commitment to prevent the repetition of the [unprecedented] tragedy… requires us to remember what happened on European soil in those days.”
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held on January 27 because it is the date Soviet troops liberated the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp in 1945.