Approximately 120,000 of the Holocaust survivors who made the Jewish state their home after the 1941-1945 destruction of European Jewry remain alive as of this month, the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs revealed ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins on Wednesday evening.
According to the Israeli government figures, around 10% of the country’s Shoah survivors, or 13,000 people, have died since last year’s Yom Hashoah, full name: Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day in May 2024.
“In the past year, we have lost about 10% of Holocaust survivors in Israel,” Minister of Welfare and Social Affairs Ya’akov Margi stated in remarks published by his office on Tuesday.
“This places a double responsibility on all of us: first, to intensify our efforts to provide the remaining survivors with a life of dignity and comprehensive emotional and social support; and second, to act decisively to document their stories, preserve their testimonies, and pass on their legacy to future generations,” the minister added.
Approximately 32% of survivors living in the Jewish state receive some form of support from the Welfare and Social Affairs Ministry, he said. The ministry supports the development and expansion of services for survivors with an annual budget of 77 million shekels ($21 million).
The statement noted that some 2,500 Shoah survivors were impacted by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel, including around 2,000 who had to be evacuated to safety from their homes.
As of Tuesday, 128 survivors are still displaced from their homes, most of them from northern communities that were attacked by Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists in the months following the massacre.
“During the war, close ties were formed between elderly citizens from different communities who were evacuated to the same hotels—many of them Holocaust survivors—and for them, the ministry established community and social services in the evacuated hotels,” it stated.
“In order to preserve the communities that formed during the period of evacuation, the ministry recently opened 21 new centers to serve the new communities: 19 in the north and two in the south,” it added.
Some 1,400 (0.6%) of the estimated 220,800 Holocaust survivors living in 90 countries today are centenarians, and half of the remaining survivors live in Israel, according to figures published by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany on Tuesday.
The Claims Conference’s report, titled “Vanishing Witnesses: An Urgent Analysis of the Declining Population of Holocaust Survivors,” projects that just half of the Holocaust survivors alive worldwide today will remain in six years, with just 30%, or about 66,250, remaining in 2035. By 2040, just 22,080 survivors will remain, according to the Claims Conference.
