Good Thursday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on the merger of the URJ’s Heller High School in Israel program with the JNF-USA’s Alexander Muss High School, and feature an op-ed from Nic Abery. Also in this newsletter: Jose Mugrabi, Nancy Kaplan Belsky and Lisa Apfelberg. We’ll start with a new compensation agreement for Holocaust survivors struck between the Claims Conference and the German government.
The German government agreed to allocate nearly $1.5 billion in direct compensation and home care services for Holocaust survivors for 2024, following extended negotiations with the Claims Conference, the organization announced Thursday, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
The Claims Conference, formally known as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said the German Federal Ministry of Finance had also agreed to guarantee several existing programs for at least several more years, including a direct compensation program and funding for Holocaust education.
“This year we were very successful,” the Claims Conference’s executive vice president, Greg Schneider, told eJP, crediting the agreements to “a combination of presenting a tremendous amount of data, the political pressure that we bring to bear and the realization, which we make clear again and again, that these are the last few years that the German government will even have the opportunity to help survivors.”
Under the agreements, the German government agreed to provide $888.9 million in 2024 for home care services to survivors, as well as $535 million in direct compensation for survivors in 2024 through monthly pensions or one-time payments, according to the Claims Conference. The German government also agreed to continue funding Holocaust education programs through 2027.
Schneider said the negotiations with the German government, which always include Holocaust survivors, are often emotionally charged and even macabre, dealing with harsh actuarial calculations about life expectancies and medical needs.
“I think grim is a good word,” Schneider said. “They are somber, they’re serious, they’re raw, they’re emotional. We have to speak about numbers. We have to speak about how many people will be eligible, about what’s the cost per person, what’s the cost of home care. There are a lot of numbers, but we are cognizant that this, ultimately, is never about numbers. It’s about people.”
Read the full story here.
Credit:Source link
