Hebrew University law student Liron Mark helped launch a branch of Project La’ad at her school to help survivors through the tan

Seven decades after she endured four years of unspeakable hunger, freezing temperatures, lice epidemics and perpetual fear of death in the Romanian ghetto of Dej Maturin, Penina Katzir once again felt naked, forced to reopen her wounds from the Shoah and answer the probing questions of an Israeli government-appointed psychiatrist.

“It was humiliation that you cannot even define in words,” Katzir said. “I didn’t file the original request forms with the Germans because they forced survivors to go to shrinks to prove that they were abnormal. …When it became the Israeli government’s responsibility, I was sure I wouldn’t have to go to a shrink and undergo such humiliation. But surprisingly and sadly it was the same — or even worse. In each and every committee, I needed to sit there and open the same old wounds again and again that I had spent my whole life repressing.”

Katzir, now 80, and her husband Yaakov, 78, underwent this obligatory mental health evaluation in 1998, joining a new wave of Holocaust survivors who were finally reclaiming war reparations that were lost somewhere in the complex bureaucracies of the Israeli and German governments, as well as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Today, Katzir is one of approximately 200,000 to 250,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel, 60,000 to 90,000 of whom live under the poverty line. Only in the recent past has the government begun taking note that the money was not yet in the hands of the survivors, explained Michal Ben Attar, national coordinator of the Jewish Agency’s Project La’ad (“Forever”), launched in May 2009 to help these survivors claim their money.

“Only in the 1980s did society start to speak about the Holocaust,” Ben Attar said. “Only in the last decade was it legitimate to talk about these payments they didn’t receive.”

Israel may have recognized the problem, but getting the money into the hands of these survivors is still not easy. The process includes not only the intense psychiatric exam, but also submission of complex tax forms that require extensive legal review, which is financially prohibitive to most survivors. In an attempt to resolve this problem, the Jewish Agency established Project La’ad, which provides intensive training for volunteers around the country who make home visits to these survivors, notify them of their rights and help them fill out the basic forms.

“A lot of our volunteers themselves are second- or third-generation descendants of survivors, and sometimes they’re coming to complete a cycle that they never fulfilled,” Ben Attar said.

The volunteers include university students, Russian immigrants serving in the Israel Defense Forces and many others. They get funds from the Israeli government, the UJA-Federation of New York and the Canadian Jewish Federations. Since the launch, the project has recruited 2,500 volunteers and has reached out to 10,000 survivors, with an additional 18,000 in an unofficial pilot program the previous year, according to Ben Attar.

“The survivors are not able even to make the phone call and do the fulfillment of rights themselves,” Ben Attar said. “We need people with ambition” to help them.

And one of these groups has decided to take the project even further.

When Hebrew University first-year law student Liron Mark found out about La’ad from the campus volunteer coordinators, she and her friends knew that they needed to launch a branch of the project at the law school. Who better to review legal forms, free of charge, than Israel’s lawyers-to-be, she decided.

“People feel so bad about this whole situation, about how survivors have been taken advantage of by the government,” said Mark, who herself has two survivor grandparents. “Every time they need to go and fill out forms, and every time they have talk about what happened to them in the Holocaust, to prove that they experienced mental damage. It’s like a war of exhaustion between the government and the people.”   Continue reading…