JERUSALEM — In an indictment of Israel’s care for mentally ill survivors of the Holocaust, a public committee this week demanded that their conditions improve.
The committee’s numerous recommendations include the immediate establishment of an independent panel of experts to determine which of the approximately 800 Holocaust survivor patients can safely be discharged from mental institutions to community hostels and old-age homes.
Health Minister Yehoshua Matza, who had read an interim report several months ago, has already appointed such a panel.
The six-member public committee was appointed by the Health and Justice ministries in August after Ma’ariv investigative reporter Ronel Fisher and TV filmmaker Ilana Tzur separately exposed the suffering of Holocaust survivors who lived most of their lives in mental institutions.
The committee’s 78-page report was presented to Matza and Justice Minister Tzahi Hanegbi.
The committee, headed by retired district court judge Ya’acov Bazak, denounced the generally primitive conditions in which the emotionally disturbed survivors have been kept for decades. It cited meager government allocations and the failure to move them into community facilities and give them more effective medications.
The committee members, who heard many witnesses and visited a number of mental institutions where survivors live, couldn’t even get from the authorities an exact number of patients involved.
Most patients lack social activities and esthetic surroundings, the committee stated. “From the beginning, government mental hospitals have been at the bottom of state priorities, run on a poverty budget,” the report stated.
Some wards lacked windows. Even today, Abarbanel Hospital in Bat Yam has an old wing with 38 octogenarian patients, some with urinary and digestive problems, who have to go to one of three outdoor toilets. Patients who have been there for three decades or more have only a small bedside cabinet to store all their worldly possessions.
The committee disclosed that the government spent significant sums on building some new wards inside hospitals for the Holocaust survivors — instead of establishing hostels in the community where suitable patients could live a more independent life. One reason for the previous policy of discouraging patients from leaving, the committee said, was “opposition by hospital administrators” who feared losing permanent state funding for each occupied bed.
Until very recently, state psychiatric hospitals prohibited their doctors from informing patients and their families of new drugs costing $30 to $50 per month that would be much more effective treatment, because the medications are not included in health coverage. This, said the committee, violated the Patients’ Rights Law. The committee also demanded that Holocaust survivors get the best and most effective medications at state expense.
The Justice Ministry’s supervision of legal guardians for some of the mental patients was sharply criticized. Most of the guardians only managed the patients’ financial affairs and did not bother to purchase needed devices and goods not supplied by the hospital.