A substantial number of the 500,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide are suffering from poverty and need urgent help to live a dignified life in their last years, an adviser to the US secretary of state said on Wednesday.
"It's really unacceptable that those people who in their youth suffered so grievously should have to live out their declining years in deprivation, isolation and poverty," Stuart Eizenstat, special adviser on Holocaust issues to John Kerry told AFP.
"In New York City alone, of the 60,000 survivors, 50 per cent are in that state. In Israel about a third are, and in the former Soviet Union countries upwards of 85-90 per cent are in poverty," he said on the sidelines of a conference in Prague.
"All the surveys indicate that substantial percentages of those (survivors) are living in poverty or near poverty," Mr Eizenstat added. » | AFP | Wednesday, May 27, 2015
