Jerusalem – Some 208,000 Holocaust survivors remain in Israel, 66 years after the end of World War II, a non-profit organization which assists the aging victims said Sunday.
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Half of them are older than 80, and every day about 35 die, said the Tel Aviv-based Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel.
It published the results on the eve of Israel’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was to begin at sunset Sunday and end at sunset Monday.
A state ceremony at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial institute Sunday evening was to open the 24 hours of memorial services.
On Monday, a two-minute siren is scheduled to wail throughout the country and Israel will come to a standstill, with cars stopping in the streets and pedestrians pausing in honour of the 6 million Jews who were murdered in World War II.
Some 74,000 are direct survivors of the camps and ghettos, while the remaining 134,000 are Holocaust refugees – European Jews who survived the war by fleeing the Nazi horrors or going into hiding.
While in the early years after Israel’s foundation in 1948, Holocaust survivors made up about half the country’s Jewish population, they today form under 4 per cent.
Their number is dwindling fast – about nearly 13,000 die each year, said the Holocaust survivors foundation.
That means that in some 16 years no one will be left in Israel to tell the story of the Holocaust first hand.
The foundation commissioned a study by an Israeli-Jewish American social research centre, the Meyers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, which found that the remaining survivors sometimes live in difficult conditions.
Some 40 per cent of the survivors reported loneliness. Around 20 per cent said they did not have enough heating in the winter. About 5 per cent said they did not have enough food, while another 25 per cent said they had enough to meet their daily needs, but not the kind they would like. Many also suffer from age-related health problems.
Foundation chairman Elazar Stern said the results of the study showed that the need for assistance among aging Holocaust survivors would only grow in the coming years.
‘The young generation won’t forgive us if we don’t care for the older generation with the respect that it deserves,’ he said.
‘We are in a race against time,’ added CEO Rony Kalinsky, noting that also those without socio-economic problems needed help ‘coping with loneliness and the distress that stems from their harsh past.’