Dwindling Holocaust Survivor Population Forces Charities To Find Alternative Guilting Techniques

Alternatives don’t have the same unifying solidarity underlying them that makes Shoah business so effective.

Jerusalem, May 11 – Israelis who lived through Nazi persecution number in the low six figures at most, statistics indicate, which places fundraising efforts for various welfare projects in jeopardy, as those organizations must begin pivoting away from tugging heartstrings to solicit money by recruiting such aged people in their publicity materials as more and more of them die off or become otherwise incapacitated.

Depending on the definition used by the statisticians in question, somewhere between 115,000 and 140,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel – with all but a handful of the very oldest having lived through Nazi-controlled Europe or North Africa as children or adolescents. The shrinking demographic can provide fewer and fewer paid or volunteer candidates each year to look poor, lonely, and receiving insufficient care so that the organization producing the fundraising promotion can guilt Israelis into choosing that charity over others. The phenomenon has received increased attention at nonprofit powwows over the last three decades.

Soon, analysts predict, the fundraising models will cease to shame people into thinking their own stinginess might contribute to the substandard living conditions of Holocaust survivors, and charity organizations will be forced to cobble together causes with less general appeal in order to meet their fundraising goals.

“Th Shoah remains the only truly universal trauma that can be milked in this way,” acknowledged Ronit Hermann, a resource development consultant with Shatil, the NGO-capacity-building arm of the New Israel Fund. “For decades, it’s been something of a cash cow. But as it gets harder and harder to find survivors able and willing to serve in this mascot capacity, organizations must identify and develop alternatives – none of which, unfortunately, have the same unifying solidarity underlying them that made Shoah business so effective.”

“October seventh certainly resonates in terms of trauma,” she explained, “but it’s still too raw and looks too exploitative this close in. It’ll be a good few years before ‘Nova survivor’ or ‘October seventh survivor’ becomes a thing in general charity fundraising work. In the meantime, organizations must fall back on the standbys of distressed children and overwrought, staged scenes of struggle, to get the desired emotional response.”

In some political circles, however, the alarm bells mean little. A spokesman for Human Rights Watch assured a journalist that if the group’s work succeeds, a second Holocaust will take place soon enough, with the only question becoming whether there will be anyone around afterwards to fundraise off of it.

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