Thousands of offspring of Nazi Holocaust survivors in Israel are seeking reparations from Germany to pay for psychiatric treatment they say they require as a result of trauma suffered by their parents.
Baruch Mazor, director of a Tel Aviv-based attorneys’ fund behind the campaign, said on Tuesday he had taken the unusual step of filing a lawsuit against Berlin in a Tel Aviv court, in a bid to press Germany to negotiate his group’s demands.
The lawsuit was seen as the first ever filed by representatives of the so-called ”second generation” or those descended from the survivors of the World War II slayings of six million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Mazor said his group, representing some of the 400 000 Israelis born to survivors, wants Germany to fund twice weekly therapy sessions for three years for up to 20 000 people he says need counselling because of their parents’ war-time trauma.
The suit lists no composite sum, Mazor said, but estimated that the psychiatric care in question cost about 600 Israeli shekels a week per person, which could add up to about €300-million in total if all victims claimed the compensation.
Mazor said that thousands of Israelis born to Holocaust survivors ”suffer from fears and anxieties because they experience what their parents went through as though it is happening to them”.
He cited experts’ findings in the past few decades linking certain psychological troubles faced by some survivors’ offspring with the trauma their parents experienced in the death camps or ghettos where many of the victims perished.
Nearly 4 000 had signed on to his suit filed on behalf of the Tel Aviv-based Fisher Fund headed by Israeli attorney Gideon Fisher, Mazor told Reuters in a telephone interview.
The Israeli court was not expected to issue a quick ruling due to a summer recess, and it was unclear whether the court would find it had jurisdiction to handle the case.
War-related stress
”There are people who have to choose between buying food and getting treatment,” Mazor said, many of whom cannot hold down a regular job because of psychiatric problems that can be traced to a childhood stress related to what their parents suffered.
Many grew up in the shadow of their parents’ nightmares and were hurt psychologically as a result, said Mazor, himself a son of Holocaust survivors.
”All we want is for their psychological care to be funded. This claim isn’t aimed at putting any money in our pockets.”
The German Foreign Ministry had no comment.
”I have knowledge of this matter in as far as I have read about it in the press,” a ministry spokesperson said in Berlin. She added that Germany took ”very seriously” all matters related to Holocaust survivors.
Germany has so far paid out about €64-billion in compensation, in reparations to Israel and to the Claims Conference that won restitution to Holocaust victims worldwide in the late 1990s.
Mazor said his group had waited to file its suit so as not to interfere with the Claims Conference’s efforts to compensate actual war victims in the past few years.
He said the group had held talks with Germany but that these broke down a few months ago, leading to their decision to go to court, and that he still hoped a settlement could be reached without further litigation. — Reuters