Dear Fred Weston,
In your speech to the ULU Marxist Society you mentioned the fact that people's pensions were being cut here in Israel.
Yesterday one of the people who come to my wife's help foundation went to see a psychiatrist because she had been driven to the depths of despair, and wanted to kill her self. Her small pension had been cut to the extent she had to go and pick up food from the filthy dirty floor of our local market.
My wife and I live on disability pensions, plus my wife gets two pensions because she was a guest in a Stalin Gulag. Thankfully, our pensions have not been touched.
However, it seems that the Russians are being deliberately targeted as regards pensions. Also this is the second case that my wife has had of someone wanting to kill themselves because they did not have enough to live on.
Suicides amongst the new immigrants are not generally reported. They only report when they involve murder. The rate for these sort of acts is very high amongst the Ethiopians, whole families being murdered, then the person who committed the act killing themselves.
The attitude of officials towards the immigrants is appalling. The woman in question was turned away by the first doctor she went to see. He was a Russian. The elite Russians and those Russians "Who have made it" don't want to know their fellow country men/women when they need help.
Regards,
Mordechai Peargut in Israel,
March 20, 2008