The Tel Aviv District Court made legal history this week, ruling that the state must pay out compensation totaling NIS 17 million to a group of 217 Holocaust survivors who sued for unpaid reparations.
The claimants, mostly in their 80s, belong to a group of survivors known as the Tehran Children, Jewish orphans who fled Poland for the former Soviet Union in 1939 after the Nazis massacred their parents.
The Soviets first incarcerated the children in a Siberian gulag, but later allowed them to travel to Iran with the Polish Anders Army. The orphans lived in a refugee camp in Tehran until the Jewish Agency rescued them and brought them to Israel in 1943, where their arrival and tragic personal testimonies caused shockwaves throughout the Jewish community.