From the New York Times:

THE Holocaust has always been marked by numbers. There was the numbering of arms in death camps and the staggering death toll where the words six million became both a body count and a synonym for an unspeakable crime. After the Holocaust, Germany performed the necessary long division in paying token reparations to survivors. More recently, Swiss banks and European insurance companies have concealed bank account and policy numbers belonging to dead Jews.

Only with the Holocaust have dehumanization and death been as much a moral mystery as a tragic game of arithmetic. And the numbers continue, although now largely in reverse.

After 60 years, Holocaust survivors are inching toward extinction. According to Ira Sheskin, director of the Jewish Demography Project at the University of Miami, fewer than 900,000 remain, residing primarily in the United States, Israel and the former Soviet Union. Most are in their 80s and 90s. Unless immediate measures are taken, many of those who survived the Nazi evil will soon die without a proper measure of dignity.

According to Dr. Sheskin’s data, more than 87,000 American Holocaust survivors ”” roughly half the American total ”” qualify as poor, meaning they have annual incomes below $15,000. The United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of the American Jewish Federations, determined that 25 percent of the American survivors live at or below the official federal poverty line. (The poverty figure in New York City is even higher.) Many are without sufficient food, shelter, heat, health care, medicine, dentures, eyeglasses, even hearing aids.

Conditions worldwide are similar. It’s a sad twist that the teenagers who mastered the art of survival so long ago have been forced, in their old age, to call on their survival instincts once again.

It doesn’t have to be this way….

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More than 20 Jewish organizations — including many new, Web-based groups — have launched a campaign to get presidential candidates to pay more attention to the domestic concerns of American Jews, saying politicians wrongly view Jews as primarily concerned with Israel and other foreign issues.

The groups’ premise is that the large, older, established Jewish advocacy groups — that have more clout on Capitol Hill — focus too much on foreign issues and don’t speak accurately for the majority of American Jews, who care as much about health care and the environment as anti-Semitism in Europe or Israeli politics.

The coalition’s effort focuses on a survey, conducted online ( http://www.jspot.org) during the past few weeks, in which people were asked to pick their top five domestic issues. Nearly 9,000 people, who were required to include their names, responded, according to results announced yesterday. The top issues picked were health care, the environment, education and civil rights. The coalition will solicit responses to the poll from presidential candidates.

“There is a significant disconnect between the priorities of Jews in this poll and the issues many Jewish groups are working on,” said Mik Moore, spokesman for Jewish Funds for Justice, the New York-based group organizing the effort. Coalition members include popular blogs, a record company, labor and environmental groups and others.

But some longtime Jewish advocates and historians say the campaign is as much about a new generation of activists trying to gain influence and inject their style of social justice work as it is about anything else. The new crop of groups is trying to spread influence through cultural efforts, such as JDub Records and the Jewschool blog, as well as through such traditional grass-roots groups as Jews United for Justice, which focuses on issues such as housing and labor in the D.C. area.

“It’s true that established groups haven’t spoken with one voice on domestic issues, but they have advocated for those things,” said Pamela S. Nadell, professor of history and director of Jewish studies at American University. “What’s happening is these new groups — which are very exciting — are trying to band together to exercise larger political clout.”

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Ask Rabbi Arthur Waskow how many books he’s written, and he strokes his long, white beard for a moment.

“It’s either 19 or 20,” he says, sitting in the sunlit garden of his Shalom Center in West Mount Airy. “My wife says it’s the same number as the times I’ve been arrested.”

And with that he laughs heartily.

Books. Liturgies. Civil disobedience. For the 73-year-old Waskow, all are devices for challenging convention and opening minds “at the God level.”

A peace and environmental activist, Waskow has also been bursting open Judaism for 39 years – ever since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination awoke him to Judaism’s powerful command to “heal the world.”

Esteemed in some circles for his prophetic liberalism, disdained in others, this icon of the Left is nonetheless hard to ignore. In April, Newsweek listed him as one of “the 50 most influential rabbis in America.”

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