Winnipeg’s Jewish Child and Family Services is facing a shortfall in funding after the Claims Conference—which represents Jewish Holocaust survivors around the world and negotiates on their behalf—changed the way it allocates money to services for Holocaust survivors.
Despite the $40,000 gap, the agency will continue to maintain services for the elderly survivors, JCFS executive director Al Benarroch said.
At its peak in the early 1950s, Winnipeg’s Jewish community was home to just over 1,000 Holocaust survivors. Today, there are an estimated 110 survivors left—of whom 91 are clients of Winnipeg’s Jewish Child and Family Service. As these survivors have aged, their needs increased.
JCFS currently receives and spends almost $900,000 a year total for the services to Holocaust survivors in the community.
Until recently, negotiations between the German government and the Claims Conference allocated funding for social service agencies on a ratio of one social worker to every 50 Holocaust survivor clients. As a result of recent negotiations, and to establish more consistency worldwide, this has now been changed to one worker for every 70 clients.
“On principle,” Benarroch stated, “JCFS will not reduce the amount of social work time devoted to supporting our Holocaust survivors. They deserve so much more than we already give them, and we will find a way to keep funding those positions.”
One of the social workers in this program is Adeena Lungen, herself a child of a Holocaust survivor.
Winnipeg’s JCFS began receiving funding in 2000 from the Claims Conference (officially known as The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany). Subsequently, Winnipeg also became affiliated with the Cummings Centre for Jewish Seniors in Montreal, the Canadian agency through which the funds from Claims Conference flowed to Canadian agencies assisting survivors.
In approximately 2010, the Claims Conference began funding social service programs for Holocaust survivors. The two services available are enhanced homecare which supplements the homecare offered by the provincial government and an emergency financial program that funds medical needs, products and groceries for survivors.
JCFS also gets some funds for a biweekly group for survivors based on the Café Europa model, which was introduced in Europe after the war. Held at the Gwen Secter Creative Living Centre, JCFS subsidizes transportation and a hot lunch for the participants, in addition to the entertainment or speaker.
Lungen points out that survivors are grouped into two categories by the Claims Conference for determining their funding eligibility. Those survivors who were in the camps or ghettos, hidden during the war, or were living under false identities are eligible for greater compensation than those who survived the war years in the forests or those who the Soviets sent to Siberia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
“We (the JCFS social workers) try to visit our Holocaust survivors monthly to see how they are managing,” Lungen reports. “Many are not coping well. Some have no family and as they age, they have become more isolated, frailer, and depressed.”
Apart from the supportive contact, a major part of the social worker’s role is helping the survivors complete paperwork. “For each new case we open, we have to write assessments, update ongoing files, get our new clients enrolled in the programs, help them with their Holocaust Reparation applications, apply to Montreal and New York, and keep records of our monthly contacts—home visits, check-ins and phone calls, referrals and more.
“Even at this late stage, JCFS is still opening new files for Holocaust survivors previously unknown to us. Just in the last two years, we have added several new cases, some of which are recent immigrants from Russia.”
To help with the cases of Russian-speaking survivors, JCFS has a Russian-speaking social worker on staff.
The events of Oct. 7 and the subsequent explosion of antisemitism have further traumatized many of the survivors, Lungen said.
As for making up the financial deficit, some of the options being considered include applying for grants, appealing to the Jewish community as well as seeking donations from outside of it, including local church groups.
“Our last resort will be to rearrange the agency’s current budget. This means that we will need to take from one pocket to fill the other,” said Benarroch. “There are needs everywhere, so if we have to move funds from one program, another one loses out, regardless.
“But we will find a way, we have no choice.”
