Holocaust Survivors against Olmert

Pity Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, if you can, just for a second. His popularity rating is a microscopic 2%, and on Sunday afternoon if, he dared to look out his window, he would have glimpsed a nightmarish sight: dozens of ancient Holocaust survivors gathered outside the prime minister's residency in Jerusalem, wearing death camp uniforms and a Yellow Star of David pinned to their chests.

Few things could be more shameful for the Jewish nation's leader than this ghostly parade of Holocaust victims.

Ok, second's over. That's enough pity for Olmert. In a gesture of stupefying miserliness, Olmert offered a stipend of an average $20 a month to Israel's 250,000 Holocaust survivors. That's why the Holocaust survivors and their supporters are marching in Jerusalem. Many elderly survivors say they live in misery, and they can barely pay for medical care and food. Their complaints are backed up by official figures showing that 40% of them live below the poverty line.

A woman survivor, Ruth Tatarko, quoted by Ynetnews.com, summed the sense of outrage among the elderly protesters who were joined in Sunday's “March of the Living” by 2,500 supporters, mainly from youth groups and leftist parties. “We are the last of the survivors, but it seems as though the government considers us a burden and is waiting for a biological solution,” she said.

Survivors' representatives remarked tartly that Jews who returned to Germany after the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, receive a bigger pension than those who settled in the Jewish state.

Both the President Shimon Peres and rightwing opposition leader Benyamin Netanyahu urged Olmert to improve his offer. If he doesn't, the Prime Minister risks shaving off the remaining two points on his popularity rating.

---by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem