A multimillion-dollar emergency assistance fund has been created to help Holocaust survivors impacted by the coronavirus, it was announced in New York today.

Describing the virus as “the greatest challenge for survivors since the end of the Shoah,” Greg Schneider, Executive Vice President of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, told the JC the money would “mitigate the potential disaster, and on so many levels.”

The new $4.3 million fund (£3.5 million) will boost existing services and add new ones to help 120,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide, Claims Conference president Julius Berman said in a statement released Monday.

Included are meal and medicine delivery, rental payments and provision of home care, masks, gowns, gloves and sanitising agents.

Social programmes – normally face-to-face – will be substituted with telephone and Internet programs to help alleviate isolation and loneliness, all with health security in mind.

The organisation is “committed to ensuring that all grants and services are uninterrupted and emergency needs are met,” Mr Berman said in the statement. The fund may be increased as needed.

Among the unexpected costs are those for:

transportation for home care workers in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where public transit has been scaled back or stopped;

the cost of new housing for survivors made homeless by the recent earthquake in Croatia, in order to avoid exposure to the pandemic;

the cost of running the Claims Conference’s Café Europa programme virtually, so social media-savvy survivors can continue to hear Yiddish music or a lecture, or discuss literature, while social distancing.

Such programmes help mitigate the isolation that may be particularly difficult for this population, Mr Schneider said: “A survivor sitting alone in their house day after day after day is a disaster.

“In Moscow, we are spending $12,000 per day just on taxis” to transport home care workers to homebound survivors. It is a huge expense that was not anticipated. We never even imagined it, but it is essential to keep people alive. We will do whatever it takes.”

In addition, the Claims Conference is advancing nearly $300 million (£244 million) in previously committed funding – about half the annual budget – to some 300 agencies worldwide to safeguard ongoing services.

The funding is unaffected by recent stock market tumbles, Mr Schneider said. “We don’t want anyone in the agencies distracted from the work of saving lives.”

The initial $2.3 million includes €200,000 (£176,000) from the Alfred Landecker Foundation, based in Berlin, Germany, and $100,000 from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, based in Owings Mills, in the US state of Maryland.

The private Landecker Foundation — launched last year by the Reimann family, heirs of a German firm that used slave laborers during the Nazi era — already established a €1 million fund last month, dedicated to helping isolated survivors around the world.

The family, whose successor company – JAB – is known worldwide for such brands as Krispy Kreme and Coty, announced its allocation after Hungarian-born survivor William Stern became the first Holocaust survivor in the UK known to have died of the illness.