Betty Boiangiu, 93, a Holocaust survivor from Romania, spends most of her day sitting by her living room window, gazing down at the street two stories below.

She requires ongoing medical attention for various ailments, but said that without help from her two children and caretaker, she would not be able to get to a doctor or even navigate the digital world of medical care to make an appointment.

“I don’t have an app, and then they ask me to press this or that and I get confused,” Boiangiu told The Times of Israel during a visit to her home in the coastal town of Nahariya on Tuesday. “Or they speak so quickly I can’t understand them.”

As people around the world mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Raz Avitan Katz, the CEO of nonprofit LeMa’anam (“For their sake” in Hebrew), which provides free home healthcare visits to Holocaust survivors, said that according to the organization’s recent medical report on the approximate 110,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel, many are forgoing medical treatment due to a 30% spike in difficulties in reaching, coordinating, and implementing medical care.

“The average age of survivor is 86,” Katz said, speaking to The Times of Israel by telephone. “About 28% of survivors are defined as housebound, many of whom live in buildings without an elevator. For people who live alone, the logistics of arranging transportation to a doctor are overwhelming. They fear they could fall, so they give up treatment altogether.”

Katz said that the transition to digital systems has left out people such as Boiangiu because it has created a “de facto exclusion of a population that has difficulty using online applications and tools.”

The accumulation of barriers leads to the postponement of tests,........

© The Times of Israel