IN RIVKA Hilsenrat's Ramat Gan apartment, the cellophane tape is still on the bedroom windows from the 1991 Gulf War. (The Scuds fell not far away.) The paint in the old-fashioned apartment is chipped, the surface of the kitchen cabinet is peeling, the air conditioner is a relic. At the age of "80-plus," Hilsenrat, who lost much of her family to the Nazis in Ukraine, and who went blind five years ago, lives alone in a deteriorating tenement.

Between her NIS 2,000 a month from Germany, her NIS 1,100 old-age pension, her caregiver from the government and the Keren, her children who come cook for her on Fridays, and the volunteers who drop in from time to time, Hilsenrat, who's been in Israel since 1950, can just keep her head above water. She's always in overdraft, but has enough to pay her bills and buy her medicines. As for food, she says: "How much can I eat?"

She's a kindly-faced lady, all bundled up, eager to please and almost desperately happy to have visitors to talk to. She starts crying, though, when she remembers Ukraine.

"I lost half of my family, my three brothers, everyone went. My father died in the street, I sold my dress for half a loaf of bread so we could stay alive."

She seems to see an unbroken line between the griefs of her past and her troubles of today. "How can I pay the electricity, the telephone, the gas? My children can't help, my son had open heart surgery, my daughter has scoliosis. I can't afford to buy a present for my grandchildren. My husband died three years ago, he didn't have a pension. This is an old house, there's always something breaking, I have to pay for somebody to fix it. I have a social worker but she doesn't come, they give me a basket of food for Pessah, that's it. I don't sleep well, I don't walk well, I have high blood pressure. I have to take a taxi to the Kupat Holim, it costs so much."

Hilsenrat is not homeless, she's not hungry, she can afford the basics. She survives.

"My life is very hard," she weeps. "No one believes me."

I ASK MK Colette Avital, considered the survivors' leading advocate in politics, how the people in power, the people in control of the nation's purse strings, can allow Holocaust survivors in this country to be poor.

"The answers I've gotten are that we've done more than our own share, that we ended up paying the survivors more than we got from Germany because the survivors lived longer than was expected. The finance ministers say, 'Where will we get the money?'" Avital explains over the telephone. "Maybe they're afraid of setting some sort of precedence. I've even heard people argue that Israel should not have to be [financially responsible to the survivors] for those crimes."

The only compensation to survivors that comes out of the Israeli government's pocket is the monthly pension, typically NIS 1,040, that goes to some 50,000 survivors. These are the ones who suffered the worst under the Nazis and who arrived in Israel by 1953, the year the reparations agreement with Germany took effect. The Israeli government also gives Amcha, which provides social clubs, psychological therapy and home visits to 9,500 survivors, 2% of its budget. To the budget of the Keren, which provides home nursing care, emergency grants and emergency dispatch alarms to 30,000 survivors, the government contributes nearly 10% - up from 2% a few years ago. The bulk of Amcha's and the Keren's funds come from the New York-based Claims Conference, which administers unclaimed Jewish-owned property in Germany.

"I found out only recently," continues Avital, "that the Israeli government continues to get money from Germany - $200 million a year. After you subtract from that the money the [Israeli] government gives to Holocaust survivors, there's still a lot of money left over."

She goes on to say that Israel, in effect, taxes the German reparations payments of Holocaust survivors who enter state-owned old-age homes by taking 8% of their reparations toward the nursing home's fee. Noting that the reparations agreement with Germany declares these payments non-taxable, Avital says the government "argues that it's not a tax, but the fact is that the government is deducting money from payments that are supposed to go entirely to Holocaust survivors."

Furthermore, she says a survivor cannot get more than roughly NIS 3,600 a month in combined Israeli old-age pension and German reparations. (The latter usually runs NIS 1,000 to NIS 2,000 a month.) "The government deducts anything over about NIS 3,600 a month," she explains, "so God forbid you don't end up with more than that."

IT SHOULD be noted that out of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel - again, using the Keren's low estimate - only about 50,000 receive German reparations, based on the same criteria as those of the Israeli-funded survivor's pension.

Comparing Israel with other countries on how generous or ungenerous they are to their resident Holocaust survivors isn't a simple matter. There is no objective answer. There are economic variables: how rich the country is, how many Holocaust survivors live there, what sort of aid the country gives its elderly citizens in general. But there is also the moral question: Does the Jewish state have a greater responsibility for the welfare of its Holocaust survivors than other countries, or doesn't it? The governments of Germany, France and Austria give more financial aid to resident Holocaust survivors than the Israeli government does, but those countries were culpable for the Holocaust. On the other hand, notes Avital, Israel is the only state that gets Holocaust reparations money from another state.

He adds that there is a legitimate argument, even if he disagrees with it, against the Israeli government favoring Holocaust survivors over other poor, elderly citizens: "First, the government [already] gives them more [the NIS 1,040 monthly state pension received by about one in five survivors]. Second, in a Jewish state, should a poor, aged Ethiopian immigrant or Moroccan immigrant receive less assistance than a Holocaust survivor?"

Yet Ze'ev Factor, chairman of the Keren and himself a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, argues that to a substantial degree, the State of Israel grew out of the Holocaust, whose living human legacy was the survivors. Not only did the Holocaust play a crucial role in the UN's recognition of the state, but in the early years of nation-building, "Israel built roads, hospitals and an army with the help of German reparations money," he points out.

As for the argument that the poverty of Holocaust survivors should not take precedent over the poverty of other aged Israelis, Factor replies: "The survivors' quota of suffering was more than filled up a long time ago. You cannot allow them to be hungry again. You cannot allow a Holocaust survivor to be cut off from the world again because he can't afford a hearing aid."