SAN DIEGO—The Serving Older Survivors unit of Jewish Family Service has an opportunity to increase its $280,000 annual budget by $130,000.  Obtaining such additional funds from the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany would enable the SOS unit to increase services to the 70 financially distressed people it now serves, and perhaps start serving as many as 30 other impoverished survivors on its waiting list.

The opportunity comes in the form of a "challenge" grant from the organization that was created following negotiations between Germany and the organized Jewish community to pay restitution for Nazi crimes against Jews. The Claims Conference will provide a grant of $65,000 to San Diego, only if a matching amount of $65,000 can be raised locally by May 15— in slightly more than a month—and not just any $65,000. 

Under the rules of the challenge, Jewish Family Service may not turn to stalwart supporters such as the Jacobs Family Foundation or the Viterbi Family Foundation—created respectively by Qualcomm co-founders Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi—and say, "please, please, help us out again." 

Instead, the money must come from "new donors," people who have never contributed before, people who can't bear the idea that Holocaust Survivors, in their declining years, are suffering again—from recurring memories, lack of transportation, isolation, and failing health.  

At the invitation of Teri Wilner, a JFS case manager whose clients are European Holocaust survivors who have been in this country for a half century or more, I visited the SOS unit in Mission Valley earlier this week  to learn more about the work done there.  We were joined by Tatiana Livshits, who helps survivors who are recent immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine, and by Hedy J. Dalin, manager of the unit.

Wilner and Livshits say the Holocaust survivors have all the needs of other elderly people on very limited income—plus some other problems that are unique to them as a group.

Hedy J. Dalin, (left) JFS director of care manage-
ment, with Teri Wilner and Tatiana Livshits.

Too poor to be able to afford to move into an assisted living facility, the seniors  in some cases are too frail to clean their houses,  fix their appliances, lift heavy objects, or take care of the myriad of chores that younger, healthier people take for granted. The SOS program provides between 8 and 10 hours per week of home care per client. In some cases, the clients have medical conditions requiring them to buy special equipment, but lack the funds to do so.  In response, SOS will help purchase such equipment, for example a "push up" chair that is easier  for the senior to get up from. In some cases, JFS arranges transportation for seniors to doctor's appointments, or to the grocery store, or for other shopping.

The clients often live in rented quarters, and when their landlords decide to turn the apartments into condominiums, the seniors can't afford to buy them.  So the SOS program will help the seniors find a new apartment, and help them move in.  Without such help, many would have neither the strength nor the financial capability to make a move—assuming they can find a new apartment at a rental they can afford.

Whereas JFS is required to maintain confidentiality about who their clients are, one survivor, Vera Stein, voluntarily shared information about her life as one who is "poor in San Diego."  Born to Jewish parents in  Berlin in 1924, her Russian father was a physician, her Polish mother a costume designer. Their comfortable middle class life ended when the Nazis came into power.  They left Germany in 1938, traveling to Israel via Switzerland and a stay in a British internment camp for illegal immigrants.  

The family immigrated legally  in 1942 to the United States, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in literature in 1946 and went to work soon thereafter as a reporter at PM, an afternoon newspaper in New York City.  Her career later took her into advertising, then into the retail business, and in 1972, she moved to San Diego where she worked at various retail stories until "poor health forced me to retire in 1994."  Today, she said, "my total income per month is $1,024, which does not even cover my expenses."

"I am immensely grateful to JFS for their financial and emotional support, without their help I could not survive," she said.  "I told my counselor if only 100 people would donate $10 per month I would be out of this financial trap that I am in. That would improve my physical and mental health and restore the will to live. ... By supporting JFS you are saving people like me."

In an interview, Stein, 82,  said climbing rents are perhaps her biggest worry. If she could have one wish granted, she said, it would be that the Jewish community build subsidized rental units for people like herself to live in through the end of her days. If she could have two wishes, the second would be for better transportation. She lives in the southern portion of La Jolla, south of Bird Rock.  "Not everyone in La Jolla is wealthy," she says.  Having no car, she is dependent on bus transportation—and she is alarmed that San Diego Transit may change the stops for Route 9.  "You try to walk eight blocks to do your shopping and then walk home," she said.

Wilner said that like so many other financially-strapped Holocaust survivors, Stein would like to be more involved in Jewish community activities, but, without transportation, is unable to do so.  The  JFS caseworker said if synagogues throughout the county could organize programs to provide round-trip transportation services to Shabbat services and other synagogue events, they would do the survivors, as well as other seniors, a world of good.

In addition to having similar housing and transportation problems, other Wilner clients also are plagued by recurring memories and flashbacks to the Holocaust.  Because many of them are widows, living alone and without  family in the immediate vicinity, their sense of isolation may be one factor accounting for these painful flashbacks, said Wilner, who is trained as a psycho-therapist.  Because ,any clients do not have cars, and cannot easily take public transportation, they spend their time without social stimulation.

Once a month Wilner tries to get her clients together for an afternoon of talk and socialization at the JFS Senior Center operated at the Chabad of University City. Getting the survivors together is a major, and somewhat expensive, logistical exercise because the seniors have to be provided round-trip transportation. Every six months or so, Wilner also arranges for a special get-together for the seniors, a night at the Theatre in Old Town.

While the survivors enjoy each other's company, they live over too wide an area of San Diego County to make frequent get-togethers practical—especially with transportation costs so high.  

In such circumstances, Wilner said, the survivors may tend to fixate on the terrible past. She related the story of  a client who survived a concentration camp, "came to this country, met another survivor, married, continued to raise her child (who had survived the concentration camp with her), worked successfully, managed to save a little money, and then her husband died two years ago. 

"She was in a marvelous day program where her emotional needs were met; but that program was closed.  She had a birthday a couple of months ago, and that brought back the memories. She started hallucinating , and bringing back all the dead people who were really close to her, and just talking to them through the walls.  She is waiting for them to pick her up, and as each one doesn’t come pick her up, she invents a new one. One day she is getting married and she went out and bought new furniture for her marriage. 

"Her daughter, the child who was in the concentration camp, is now living with the mother – you can imagine to be a child in a concentration camp , what your ideas of life are, what scars you carry.  The mother refuses to get any psychiatric help, and based upon our current laws, we can’t impose it, if she is not a danger to herself and  others. Her hallucinations are keeping her up at night.  She gets up in the middle of the night because her ' lover' is going to come, pick her up….  These are typical of survivors, these flooding back of memories that have become dysfunctional."

Dalin, who is herself the child of survivors as well as the wife of the community chaplain, Rabbi Ralph Dalin, related the story of another client who " had a brain tumor and all of a sudden she started thinking that she was back in concentration camp. ... She was having visual hallucinations, and just wasn’t functioning.  She really thought she was back in the concentration camp. It was horrendous. Her husband was a soldier who was one of the rescuers and for him to see his wife mentally going back there, groveling for food, was anguish, total anguish. She didn’t die long after that." 

Livshits told me that although her Russian and Ukrainian clients also are Holocaust survivors, they are less likely to discuss their World War II experiences with other people, perhaps because they are so focused on adjusting to their new lives in America.

Beset by language problems, her clients often need help translating documents as they deal with various government agencies.  While most of them had no formal Jewish education in the Soviet Union—where the teaching of religion was scorned—they maintained their Jewish identities during the Communist period, and would like to learn more about American Jewish life and customs.  For example, she said, it would be a mitzvah if some knowledgeable Russian-speaking Jews could organize seders to teach them in their own language about the customs of Passover.

Seventy different JFS clients mean seventy different stories—some of them awe-inspiring tales of survival, said Wilner.  One of her clients escaped her Nazi-occupied homeland by seducing a guard while her family dashed across the Italian border. Her husband lagged behind, and when the guards caught on to what was occurring, they tried to physically restrain the husband from crossing the border.  But since more than half his prone body was across the border, Italian border guards intervened and dragged him to safety.

Another client " ran through the woods with a four-year-old daughter on his back, walking innumerable miles  to safety," Wilner related.

Obviously no one can change the horrors that these survivors endured. But the San Diego Jewish community is in a position to help our elderly Jewish victims of war and Nazi bestiality in their latter years.  More information about contributing toward the challenge grant may be obtained from Dalin, Wilner or Livshits at their offices at 2565 Camino Del Rio South, Suite 110, or by telephoning them at (619) 574-2526.  The challenge clock is ticking.