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Last night (15/1) we published exclusively in Walla Real Estate an article showing how the 2024 budget, which is currently being voted on before the Knesset, harms the financial assistance given to elderly homeless people who immigrated to Israel in the past 10 years, some of them Holocaust survivors.
In light of the article, MK Merav Cohen of the Yesh Atid faction, who previously served as Minister of Social Equality, submitted an urgent query to the Minister of Aliyah and Absorption, MK Ofir Sofer, and also wrote an urgent letter to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in which she wrote the following: "The population entitled to public housing is, from the outset, a weakened population fighting for its few rights, particularly the right to live with dignity. Citizens who wait many years to receive adequate public housing do so not out of choice but out of painful necessity."
"Without rent assistance during this time, many could fall into severe poverty. If the proposed change is approved, it will be a serious contradiction to the values of the State of Israel as a welfare state that takes care of its citizens until their last day."
Meirav Cohen at the swearing-in of the 25th Knesset, November 15, 2022/Reuven Castro
Rent assistance payments to those eligible currently stand at NIS 700-1200, with only the elderly receiving a special raise recently to NIS 2,900. In the current budget, instead of significantly increasing rental assistance for everyone, as is customary during a major social crisis, it can be seen that in the small sections of the budget, Finance Ministry officials also decided to cut the assistance of NIS 2,900 to the elderly, and to grant it only to the elderly who arrived in Israel 10 years before retirement age.
This is a series of cynical and abusive measures against poor immigrant elderly people, at a time when anti-Semitism in the world is growing and many elderly Jews want to flee to Israel. The Ministry of Finance understands that this is one of the most weakened and vulnerable populations in Israeli society, and yet it is precisely there that they chose to cut back in the most cruel way.
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Danny Gigi, executive director of the Public Housing Forum, said: "The cuts in money and the rights of the elderly are a mirror in the face of the government that is once again being revealed as a cruel government that prioritizes coalition funds over the public good. Instead of building a comprehensive plan to rehabilitate public housing and provide urgent assistance to disadvantaged populations without housing that were severely damaged in the war, they are once again looking for the most disadvantaged citizens in society who do not have a mouth to rob them of their sheep. I turn to the finance minister and tell him that there is nothing Jewish about investing in a "Jewish identity" or studying Torah at the expense of elderly Holocaust survivors who do not have money for food and medicine."
"The harm to the homeless elderly reflects the government's entire conduct vis-à-vis the housing crisis before the war, and certainly after the outbreak of the war, which is actually incompetence and an inability to plan and create solutions for the population. Rental prices and housing in general are expected to rise due to the war, and therefore it is not only the elderly who are going to be harmed by this policy of the Israeli government, which until now has not provided a comprehensive plan that will meet all the needs in the short and long term that have increased. Instead of the Finance Ministry working on creating solutions, they are busy with cuts and cuts that will cost us dearly in the long run. And the Housing Ministry doesn't think that's their job at all, and they provide Band-Aids that don't provide a real solution to the housing shortage of hundreds of thousands of families."
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