After spending his young adult life living in ghettos, enduring forced marches and cheating death in concentration camps, Julius Drabkin wouldn’t mind a few extra dollars to help pay the doctors’ bills.
That’s why Drabkin, who immigrated to San Francisco from his native Riga, Latvia, in 1979, was one of several hundred Bay Area residents to sign up recently for a new fund aimed at California’s low-income Holocaust survivors.
“I may soon have to go to a convalescent home. I am 83 and my condition is not very good. I have heart problems and high blood pressure and some surgeries. With money, it would improve my lifestyle,” said Drabkin. “It is good they are giving.”
The funds, made available following a settlement by a group of Dutch insurance companies with the state of California, will award $4 million to the state’s survivors. Administered by the California Humanitarian Foundation for Holocaust Survivors, the funds will be divvied up among qualified applicants.
To be eligible, survivors must have moved to the state no later than Nov. 2, 2000, earn no more than $17,180 or a joint income of $23,220 a year and possess less than $30,000 in total assets, including their homes.
Also, the fund defines a Holocaust survivor as someone who lived in Axis-controlled territories or puppet states between September 1939 and 1945, and is a member of a group designated for persecution based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, marital status or mental condition.
The money is meant to aid survivors like Drabkin, a long-retired dental technician who is disabled with a heart condition and living largely off the pension of his late wife, who died 10 years ago.
Anita Friedman, executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services, estimates that 10 to 15 percent of the state’s 4,000 to 5,000 survivors meet the fund’s criteria. She believes as many as 700 Bay Area survivors might qualify.
“Just from word of mouth, we have over 200 applications already in process,” said Friedman. “And we still haven’t completed our interview process.”
The average age of survivors the JFCS works with is 83, said Friedman, noting that approximately 10 to 15 percent of the state’s survivors die each year.
“Another 10 years or so and the bulk of the survivor population will no longer be with us,” she said. “That’s why this agency feels very strongly that we have to make sure they’re taken care of at this stage of life.”
The amount each survivor will receive depends upon how many sign up for the fund. The initial phase of application collection closes Oct. 12.
Friedman worries, however, that any money the survivors receive could be rapidly depleted by pressing medical costs.
“If they get $1,000 or $2,000, that’s not going to go very far to help indigent survivors get the care they need in the last years of their lives,” she said. “We’re mounting a fund-raising effort to raise those additional funds. But [the fund] does further identify more people who need help.”
Drabkin, a member of the JFCS’ Café by the Bay survivor group, said several of his friends have signed up for the fund as well. He has no idea how much money he might get, but he says that every little bit helps.
“It is difficult to find out [how much], but it is good that they made it available,” he said. “Even if what they give is not a lot, I hope [survivors] will be satisfied more.”
His World War II wounds will never be fully healed, however. When it comes to such losses, “you can’t compensate it with money.”