A Clearwater community group devoted to helping Holocaust survivors live independently is now asking the community for help.

  • Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services facing budget shortfall
  • Holocaust Survivor Program currently assists 250 survivors in Tampa Bay area
  • Visit gcjfcs.org/donate to find out more

The Gulf Coast Jewish Family & Community Services' Holocaust Survivor Program has operated for more than three decades in the Bay Area. The program provides case management, home care assistance, and other basic needs that allow survivors to stay in the comfort of their own home.

The program currently serves 250 survivors. As those survivors rise in age, the costs for providing them care also rises.

Due to those rising costs, the group is currently $1 million short of what it needs to continue its efforts.

One of the survivors receiving care through the program, Irene Levin, 89, survived Auschwitz and several other camps before British troops liberated Nazi camps.

Levin told us she will never forget the horrors.

“You see those dilapidated men pulling the dead ones, just one after the other, pulling the dead ones and dumping them some place,” Levin said.

Levin was 14 when she entered concentration camps and remembers crowded living quarters.

“The girls my age, we got the building and we were 20 to a room,” Levin said.

That very experience is why so many Holocaust survivors can’t bear to live in assisted living communities.

“Institutionalizing them and putting them in a nursing home triggers memories of the past," said Ann Marie Winter, COO of Specialized Programs and Policy with Gulf Coast. "Institutionalization for a Holocaust survivor allows them to continue to live, but not with the dignity they deserve.”

“These people have seen horrors that nobody should ever see. They have lived through gas chambers, work concentration camps, they have seen their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters killed before their very eyes. They’ve had to live through that day in and day out for the last 70 years,” said Winter.

To learn more about Gulf Coast Jewish Family & Community Services and the Holocaust Survivor Program and/or to make a donation, visit gcjfcs.org/donate. In the notes section, write Holocaust Survivor Program.

Donations via check can also be made to:

Holocaust Survivor Program
14041 Icot Blvd.
Clearwater, FL 33760