An Israeli committee that oversees the implementation of the country’s 1957 law on compensation for persecution by Nazis during the Holocaust ruled on May 11 that any Jew who lived under curfew in Bulgaria and Romania in World War 2 would be classified as a survivor, even though they were not sent to death camps.
Reporting the decision, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz and news agency ynetnews said that the decision could have an impact on thousands of Jews in Bulgaria and Romania.
The decision was made in the case of 100 Jews who lived under curfew conditions in Bulgaria and Romania in World War 2. The appeal committee also recommended that every Jew who lived under Nazi rule should be entitled to reparations and that Bulgarian and Romanian-born Jews be compensated following individual assessment from now on.
After Bulgaria allied itself with Nazi Germany in World War 2, the cabinet approved comprehensive anti-Semitic legislation called the “Law for the Protection of the Nation”. Jews’ freedom of movement and right to work were limited, the wearing of yellow badges and carrying of special yellow identity documents were made compulsory, jewellery, cash and property were confiscated, and Jews were absorbed into slave labour programmes.
In February 1943, Bulgaria agreed with Germany that all Jews living in Greek and Yugoslav Macedonia and in Thrace, administered by Bulgaria since the spring of 1941, would be surrendered to the Nazis. When it emerged that Jews from Bulgaria proper would be deported too, there was civil protest. In the face of resistance from politicians such as Dimtur Peshev and some senior Bulgarian Orthodox Church leaders, a programme to move Jews from Bulgaria to Nazi death camps was scrapped.
The surrender of Macedonian and Thracian Jews, however, took place. Transported in part by rail and in part on Danube riverboats, more than 11 000 Jews from the territories administered by Bulgaria were taken to death camps in Poland. Most did not survive.
In Bulgaria, in addition to the use of slave labour, many Jews were forced to move out of the cities. Towards the end of the war, in a move apparently designed to appease the Allies as it became clear that Nazi Germany was doomed, some Jews were allowed to leave for Palestine. Special anti-Jewish administrative bodies that had been set up nationally and in major cities and towns were dismantled.
In Israel, the question of who qualifies as survivors and may receive compensation has been a difficult issue.
Ynetnews quoted the chairman of Israel’s Association of Immigrants from Romania, Ze’ev Schwartz, as saying that close to 6000 Holocaust survivors from Romania were living below the poverty line and had got no compensation from the government.
“It is unheard of that people who can hardly make ends meet have to hire lawyers so that the court recognises their rights,” the agency quoted Schwartz as saying. He said that he would organise a protest outside the Israeli prime minister’s residence in the next few weeks.
Schwartz said that a large group of Romanian Holocaust survivors had been driven from their homes during World War 2, leaving their assets behind, yet the government had failed to compensate them since doing so would require a long and expensive bureaucratic process.
Ha’aretz said that according to the appeal committee, “minute distinctions” between survivors had led to a situation in which some had been recognised as victims while others had not.
“There is an innate problem in being able to confirm factual findings regarding events that took place six decades ago in a distant reality,” the committee members said.
In 2005, Israel’s supreme court ruled that Bulgarian-born Jews receive restitution even though they were “only” expelled from their homes and were not transported to concentration camps. However, they were required to deliver documents dating back decades in order to prove they had been suffering from mental disability.
