Former Jewish ghetto workers from Romania have been waiting in vain for a German pension. Although there has been a legal claim to a "ghetto pension" since 2002, historians do not know much about the Nazi forced settlements in Romania, unlike in popular ghettos such as Warsaw or Lodz. Time is pressing in view of the age of the survivors. The Israeli government has estimated about 5,000 cases and has been calling for action in Germany for months.

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Nevertheless, Berlin refused to discuss the issue at the German-Israeli intergovernmental consultations in the fall. In the response of the Federal Ministry of Labor to a request by the Green MEP Markus Kurth states that "the relatively high rejection rate" of pension applications from Romania is because "there are, with few exceptions to today's knowledge, no ghettos" in the sense of the German compensation rules have.

However, German courts have already made it clear that the ghetto term used in the law is to be understood broadly. "It does not matter crucially what is historically to be understood by a ghetto or was designated by the occupying power as such," it says in a judgment of the Landessozialgericht Schleswig-Holstein.

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