Needy Israeli Holocaust survivors of camps and ghettos will receive a government pension in the next two weeks.
The pension is for survivors who do not receive a monthly pension from any other source, according to a statement released Wednesday by the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Claims Conference, which represents the Jewish people in negotiations with the German government, is helping the Prime Minister’s Office identify the neediest eligible survivors for the first group to receive the funds. The Claims Conference currently pays monthly pensions from a fund that gets its money from Germany to approximately 23,000 Israeli citizens.
The Israeli government has not yet arrived at an arrangement as to who will pay the new pensions.
The announcement comes on the heels of Monday’s establishment of a state commission of inquiry to investigate the government’s handling of aid to Holocaust survivors in Israel.
President Bush said Iran remains a threat because of its quest for nuclear weapons know-how.
“Iran was a threat, Iran is a threat and Iran will be threat if the international community does not come together and prevent that country from having the know-how for a secret weapon,” Bush said Wednesday at a news conference at Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Jerusalem residence.
Bush sought to reassure Israelis that last month’s assessment by the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had shut down a nuclear weapons program in 2003 did not diminish his determination to confront Iran on the issue.
“My attitude is that a non-transparent country, a country that has yet to expose what it was up to, can easily restart a program,” he said, noting that Iran was still enriching uranium and developing nuclear-capable missiles.
Bush stressed that his aim was to confront the issue through diplomacy.
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.
