Holocaust survivors who lied about their age in Nazi captivity to save themselves from extermination and were barred from Social Security benefits in this country for lack of records to prove their true age can now get federal help to establish eligibility, according to a report in “Shoah,” the publication of the Holocaust Resource Center here.
The report said that the Social Security Administration (SSA) has revised its procedures to help Holocaust survivors establish their true birth dates. The number of Holocaust survivors resident in the United States who may benefit from the revised rules was estimated in the report at around 10,000.
According to the report, there was no administrative method in federal regulations before Oct. 15, 1980 which would help Jews who had lived in areas controlled by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s and who falsified their ages to avoid persecution or death. The report said the SSA had adopted new rules to help resolve that problem.
Under the old rules, each applicant for Social Security benefits had to attempt by his or her own efforts to prove that his or her birth records did not exist. Now, according to the report, the SSA and the State Department will help survivors with that problem.
Previously, the survivor needed sworn testimony from unrelated parties to establish a corrected age. Under the new policy, the SSA will “accept a written statement from the individual attesting to the circumstances under which the age was falsified and establish the person’s date of birth as alleged.”
ELEMENT OF FEAR REMOVED
Formerly, the report said, survivors were afraid to correct their records out of concern that this would expose them to deportation or other punitive proceedings from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The report said that now survivors “need not fear U.S. government agencies when applying for administrative relief to obtain rightful Social Security benefits.”
According to the report, the old procedures required numerous applications and appeals which were “tedious and intimidating.” Ultimately, a survivor “might have needed a hearing before a federal administrative law judge before records could be corrected and benefits granted. Now the entire process is condensed and handled at the SSA field office level.”
The report said the SSA rules changes stem from a case involving Bessie Moscowitz, who survived a Nazi concentration camp near Riga. She was 33 when she was sent to the camp where she was informed that the Nazis had a rule than any woman over 30 years of age was sent to the gas chambers. She told her captors she was 25 and they believed her. Her six brothers and sisters were murdered by the Nazis.
After the war, she married another survivor and they had a child while they were living in a DP camp. Out of fear of bureaucratic entanglement, she repeated her false birthdate when she applied for entry to the United States.
When she became 62 in 1972, she sought to apply for Social Security benefits but, according to her declaration of intention to become an American citizen, her age was 54 and the SSA rejected her application. Despite documentation from witnesses who testified to the truth of her claim of being 62, the SSA continued to deny her benefits. SSA requires such evidence of date of birth as public records or church or synagogue records and such documents are not available to many survivors.
THE TURNING POINT
The turning point came when Mrs. Moscowitz met David Kotok, a member of the United Jewish Appeal Young Leadership Cabinet, who brought her case to Rep. William Hughes (D. N.J.), who agreed to take the case to the then Attorney General Griffith Bell and to the State Department. The appeals dragged on until May of 1978 but Kotok refused to accept a negative response and asked for an appeal before an administrative law judge.
Kotok obtained letters from Lucy Dawidowicz, a Holocaust historian, and Michael Berenbaum, former associate director of Zochar, the Holocaust Resource Center, and then deputy director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. According to the report, what convinced the judge was evidence that it was an established concentration camp practice for inmates to change their birthdate to a later date to avoid the gas chambers. The judge ruled in Mrs. Moscowitz favor.
Kotok then contacted Richard Schweiker, the then Republican Senator from Pennsylvania. Schweiker and Hughes introduced legislation in Congress to make it possible for all survivors with that problem to have it resolved promptly. The legislation also guaranteed the survivors would not face deportation proceedings over false statements about their ages made in Nazi death camps.
The legislation also would have required the SSA to help survivors find their birth records, particularly in dealing with Communist bloc countries which the report said were relatively uncooperative when asked for such records.
According to the report, the prospect of such legislation becoming law spurred the SSA to announce the rule changes which included acceptance of written statements attesting to a survivor’s age and an outreach program to locate the estimated 10,000 Holocaust survivors in the United States who might benefit from the new SSA rules.
In a related case, Bet Tzedek Legal Services of Los Angeles recently asked the federal district court in Los Angeles to reverse an SSA ruling that receipt by a Holocaust survivor in Los Angeles of reparations from the West German government disqualified her from Supplementary Security Income (SSI) disability benefits.
Attorney Josh Lazar af Bet Tzedek said Felicia Grunfelder, whose disabled status is not disputed by the SSA, was rejected on grounds her reparations payments, about $200 a month, were countable income in determining SSI eligibility. Lazar filed a motion for summary judgement with federal Judge John Kronenberg A hearing in the case is expected in the fall.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
