Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Tehran boys

The Tel Aviv District Court issued a ruling that the State of Israel must pay the surviving "Tehran boys" a sum each of ca. $75,000.  This is the result of a court case that has taken years to come to a conclusion.  Who are the "Tehran Boys" and why has the court ruled that the State should pay them this money?
The "Tehran boys," or more correctly the "Tehran children" because there were girls amongst them, were a group of ca. 1,000 Polish Jewish orphan survivors of the Holocaust, whose parents were massacred by the invading Germans.  They escaped to the Soviet Union as groups and individuals and were interned in camps in the Siberian interior and Gulag.  During the war, when the Soviets decided to allow Poles to leave the USSR to fight for the free Polish army under Gen. Anders, this group of orphans were released and in 1941 allowed to travel with other Poles to Tehran.  There they were rescued by the Jewish Agency and brought as a group in 1943 to what was then Palestine under British control.  Altogether 870 of them survived the long arduous journey.  Many of them them fought in the 1948 Israel War of Independence, during which 35 of them died, and subsequently the remainder went on to live as normal Israeli citizens.
In 1952 the German Government signed a Reparations Treaty with Israel to pay billions of Deutschmarks over 12 years to the Israeli Government for the loss of Jewish property and suffering.  The problem was that this money was not intended to be paid directly to the survivors of the Holocaust.  As a consequence groups of Holocaust survivors got together and legally sued either the German of the Israeli or other Governemts for the return of property or their share in the reparations.  But, groups like the Tehran Boys were ignored.  When they arrived in Israel they were essentially on their own with no parents or relatives.  Some were taken in by kibbutzim and moshavim, but many were homeless and some lived in abandoned buildings and even buses. 
One could argue that the State of Israel suffered thru very precarious times during the 1950s and that its survival, with hostile neighbors and the influx of millions of Holocast survivors and Jews from Arab countries fleeing persecution, was not certain.  But, eventually the surviving Tehran Boys got together and brought a case starting in 2004 for their just share of the reparations.  The TA District Court this week made history by declaring that the State must pay these individuals their just share. The amount of money involved is not great, but the principle is significant, in that it recognizes that all individuals who suffered because of the Holocast are valid recipients of reparations.
When the money was given by Germany as a result of negotiations with the State of Israel, David Ben Gurion was then the PM, and his concept was that this money was a valid way for the suffering of the Jews of Europe to be used to establish the Jewish State.  Even though funds were spent on many public and social services, it was essentially the State's money.  The new ruling changes that perspective and says that actually the money was for the survivors themselves, and strictly speaking it was their money that the State should have given them directly.  Well, a lot of time has passed, things are different now, but even if belatedly the rights of the individual have been strengthened, and it is likely that other survivor groups will now sue the State for their just share of the reparations.

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