 Tel Aviv, Saturday, April 17, 2004 Who counts as a
Holocaust survivor? By Amiram Barkat
WHO is a Holocaust survivor, how
many survivors are alive today, who among them has
the most pressing needs? Almost 60 years after the
end of World War II, these questions still resonate
acutely, and spark debates among researchers, legal
experts, politicians and the survivors themselves.
The fact that hundreds of millions of dollars
belonging to Holocaust victims remain to be
disbursed intensifies this debate. The discussions
address the question of how the money is to be
distributed among survivors. At the end of this
month, a crucial discussion about this issue is
scheduled for a federal court in Brooklyn,
N.Y..  The
discussion is expected to pivot around reports
prepared in past months by two of the world's
leading experts on the demography of Jewish
communities: Jacob Ukeles, from New York,
and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Prof.
Sergio DellaPergola. The two prepared their
reports at the request of former U.S. Secretary of
State Lawrence Eagleburger, (left),
who serves as chairman of the International
Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims
(ICHEIC). Prof. DellaPergola also submitted his
report to Minister of Diaspora Affairs Natan
Sharansky.
The two researchers reached radically different
conclusions. - On Ukeles' count, there are 687,900
Holocaust survivors in the world today.
- DellaPergola's estimate is much larger:
1,092,000 survivors.
Both demographers relied on the same standard in
terms of defining a Holocaust survivor: Any Jew who
lived
for any period of time in a country that was
ruled by the Nazis or their allies is called a
Holocaust survivor (by DellaPergola) or a Nazi
victim (by Ukeles). The gap in the results derives mainly from
DellaPergola's decision to count as a survivor Jews
who lived in the Holocaust period in North African
countries (excluding Egypt), Syria and Lebanon. On
his estimate, out of the 600,000 Jews who lived in
these countries during the Holocaust period, about
a quarter million are alive today, and about
150,000 of them live in Israel. "When I examined
reports formulated in the past by Ukeles and other
researchers, I found that they simply 'forgot' to
include these Jews in their lists," says
DellaPergola. 
MOST of the North African countries, Syria and
Lebanon were ruled for some length of time by Vichy
France, which collaborated with the Nazis. Libya
was ruled until 1942 by Italy, Nazi Germany's main
European ally. All these countries passed
anti-Semitic legislation; in some, Jews were
physically persecuted.
"All these Jews faced immediate physical
dangers, and so all should be called, in symbolic
and historical senses, Holocaust victims," says Dr.
Aryeh Barnea, a legal expert and Holocaust
researcher. Such recognition, he stresses, does not
have legal validity. "In order to receive legal
recognition as a survivor, a person needs to prove
that he or she physically suffered, and was
persecuted by the Nazis," says Barnea. Not everyone accepts DellaPergola's revision.
Last week, he presented his findings to a group of
Holocaust survivors at the Knesset, and drew a
mixed response. "There were those who said it isn't
right to relate to Jews from North Africa as
Holocaust survivors - they argue that Jews in these
countries didn't face the Holocaust, as they did in
Europe," says DellaPergola. Holocaust researchers similarly criticize
DellaPergola's finding. Dr. Irit Abramski
Bligh, who heads Yad Vashem's Arab states
division, disputes DellaPergola's sweeping
designation.  | Website note:
Abraham
Foxman, wealthy and controversial
chief of the Anti Defamation League, likes
to refer to himself as a "Holocaust
survivor." As a biography
on this website shows, he was not even
born when Hitler invaded his native
Poland, and he was looked after by Polish
Catholics throughout the war; his parents
also "survived".
Author,
"Never Again? The Threat of the New
Anti-Semitism," foreword by
Elie
Wiesel
($24.95, 304 pages). |
"There's no doubt the Holocaust reached states
like Tunisia and Libya; but in countries like
Lebanon and Syria, the Vichy regime was toppled
before it could do anything. To say there was a
Holocaust there is absurd," she claims.Prof. Yehuda Bauer, one of the world's
leading Holocaust researchers, notes the dispute
about the definition of "survivor" started soon
after the Holocaust, and has yet to be settled.
"There was a major argument about the definition of
'Holocaust survivor' when Yad Vashem was founded,
and in the end the parties to
the dispute decided not to reach a
decision," he says. Bauer's own view is that it is wrong to rely on
a sweeping definition of Holocaust survivor in
reference to North African Jewry. He adds that most
of the Jews who lived in France, Romania, and
Bulgaria, and millions of Jews who fled from
Nazi-ruled lands to other countries, are not
Holocaust survivors. "As I see it," says Bauer, "Holocaust survivors
are only those people who were physically
persecuted by the Nazis or their cohorts. This
means people who lived in ghettos and concentration
camps or compulsory labor frameworks, who hid or
who joined the partisan ranks. I don't mean to
denigrate the suffering of people who suffered from
race laws and anti-Semitic decree, or those who
fled with nothing in their possession, but these
are not Holocaust survivors." |
![[]](../../std/dings/list.gif){kind=small}
write to David
Irving