Holocaust Victims to Receive Additional $4m from Weinberg Grant

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) has received an additional $4 million grant from The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation to provide emergency assistance to Holocaust victims in North America. The Weinberg Foundation, one of the largest private Jewish foundations in the U.S., has as its mission the funding of nonprofit organizations that assist low-income and vulnerable individuals and families.

The $4 million grant, which will be allocated through 2016, supplements the $10 million, five-year grant that the Weinberg Foundation provided to the Claims Conference in 2010 to help elderly Jewish victims of Nazism live out their lives in dignity. The Claims Conference will distribute the $4 million grant as follows: $500,000 in 2014 (in addition to the $1.5 million from the previous allocation); $2 million in 2015; and $1.5 million in 2016. This means that the Weinberg Foundation grant to the Claims Conference originally scheduled to end in 2014 is now extended through the end of 2016.

The Claims Conference’s Weinberg Holocaust Survivors Emergency Assistance Fund (Holocaust Survivors Emergency Fund) underwrites a range of emergency services to Jewish victims of Nazism in financial need, including basic health-care items – such as walkers and eye glasses – as well as medicine, dental care, transportation, food and short-term homecare. The Holocaust Survivors Emergency Fund provides the financial resources needed to supplement critical services for vulnerable Holocaust survivors in the communities where they reside.

Allocations from the Holocaust Survivors Emergency Fund have been made to 41 organizations in the U.S. and Canada that assist Holocaust victims in need. Each agency has an advisory committee, which includes Holocaust survivors, that reviews individual requests for assistance.

The Claims Conference has allocated a total of $305 million in 2013 for homecare and other vital welfare services for Nazi victims in 47 countries and has made it a priority to obtain additional funds in order to continue providing vital services to Nazi victims.