|
|
|
Jewish World Review Dec. 27, 1999/ 18 Teves, 5760
IT’S TUESDAY NIGHT at the Philadelphia Marriott West in Conshohocken and most
of the conference rooms are filled with corporate salesmen exhorting their
audiences to invest in a hot stock, prescribe the latest pharmaceuticals or
implement an efficient downsizing campaign.
These white-collar businessmen from all over are putting in long hours. Still,
they have it easy compared to Dr. Harold Goldman, president of the Jewish
Family and Children’s Service (JFCS) of Greater Philadelphia. Tonight, his
job is to convince a roomful of well-to-do Jews that some in their community
are suffering—not from assimilation or intermarriage—but from poverty.
Talk about a hard sell.
American Jews are used to thinking about their needy co-religionists in
Russia or underdeveloped areas of Israel. But in their own backyard? Less
than a half-hour away? Poverty is hard to fathom from inside a half-million-dollar home on the Main Line.
Yet, as head of JFCS, Goldman’s mission is to
draw the collective portrait of the 6,800 Jewish households living below the
poverty line in Greater Philadelphia. And that’s what he’s doing tonight, as
he talks to a group of 20 young leaders of the Jewish Federation of Greater
Philadelphia.
Tall and slim, with a trimmed beard, army-short haircut and an authentic
Southern twang, Goldman brings the message of a biblical prophet—in the guise
of a social worker. A stranger might mistake his subdued voice as a symptom
of the cold that clearly has the best of him, but later his colleagues will
insist that delivering a powerful message in a soft-spoken way is simply his
style, a combination of passion and a deep respect for most of the people who
enter into his life.
“The gap between the haves and the have-nots is becoming a very serious
problem for the community,” Goldman tells his audience, uncertain whether his
message is resonating with this group of up-and-coming professionals. “The
poor live mainly in the city. The affluent live mainly in the suburbs. The
result is that the rich have less empathy for and weaker bonds to those who
are less fortunate.”
The statistics are significant and startling: According to the “Jewish
Population Study of Greater Philadelphia 1996-1997,” half of the area’s
99,300 Jewish households earn less than $50,000, with a quarter of all
families pulling in less than $25,000. However, beneath these figures and
beyond the question of how to raise more money for the Jewish underclass,
Goldman sees a deeper problem—an unraveling community in which the better off
are not only indifferent, but increasingly oblivious to the less fortunate
around them.
Several days have passed since his speech at the Marriott, and Goldman is
still anxious to discuss the relationship between Jewish poverty and the
declining state of community in Jewish Philadelphia. But first, he talks
about the various pictures hanging in his office. Some are family portraits
sketched by his sister, Marilyn Weinman. Just to the left of the door are
three pictures of Orthodox yeshiva students learning Torah. Goldman found
this trio of 19th-century Viennese prints stuffed in a closet at work and
took a liking to them.
“They mean something to me,” he says, explaining that, as someone born in
1942, the traditional images remind him of a Jewish past to which he still
feels connected. “My family came to the United States from Russia in the
first quarter of the 20th century. As a young kid in the South, I experienced
anti-Semitism. Certainly the Holocaust meant a great deal to me, and I have
vivid memories of being very proud of the creation of the State of Israel.”
Goldman was born and raised in Memphis, Tenn., but while growing up, his life
was still a loud echo of the European Jewry that his parents left behind. “I
lived in an Orthodox home,” he says. “I studied in a cheder three days a week
and belonged to a Jewish youth group. Almost all my friends were Jewish.” It
was an American shtetl of sorts, a top-to-bottom Jewish community, where
belonging meant more than signing a few checks. Rich or poor, everyone knew
each other, lived together and saw each other’s problems up close. However,
Goldman adds, this type of proximity is gone and, along with it, most of the
ties that bind.
But in our region, because of suburban sprawl and the breaking down of a
“Jewish cosmology” built on Israel, remembering the Holocaust and a fear of
anti-Semitism, the community is fragmenting. As a result, low-income families
are falling through the cracks.
“If you have people who cannot participate in those kinds of things, then
they really are not part of the dialogue. They don’t share the same status.
And it’s not just economic status,” he says. “It’s really the status of being
able to participate in a shared experience. If the community keeps shifting
like this, I think those people who are left out and marginalized are going
to drift away.”
When it comes to giving a voice to those who are absent from the communal
table, Goldman and JFCS have recently adopted a more activist approach. “We
have to do a better job getting out the story of the Jewish poor,” he
explains.
The first step came last year, when the agency’s Committee for the Jewish
Poor produced a report that attempted to assess low-income needs and the
community’s “responsiveness,” as well as “to develop a plan for advocacy and
action.”
“It is such a radical step just to have a committee for the Jewish poor,”
says Betsy R. Sheerr, the JFCS board member who chaired the study. “It’s
typical of Harold, who has a very strong sense of vision and responsibility
for the entire Jewish community. He wanted to make sure that we studied the
implications of [Jewish poverty] and offered a set of recommendations to the
community. The study reveals what we think is the tip of the iceberg, but it
is still enough to get people’s attention.”
Goldman is also encouraging his board members to actively lobby for
government funding and other legislation that impacts on low-income families
and other JFCS constituents. “My pitch to our board is that we have to be
advocating—especially those of us in this world who are privileged and better
off,” says Goldman. “We have to be speaking with our friends and neighbors
about those who aren’t succeeding. We have to tell them that the Jewish world
is a complex one, that there are a lot of people who aren’t making it, who
are being left out of the good life because they may be physically
handicapped, new immigrants or single parents.”
Goldman realizes that the task of restoring communal bonds across class lines
will not be easy, especially at a time when his message is so at odds with
the dominant themes of American culture. “Our society stresses individualism
and materialism. It’s still very ‘me-oriented,’” he says. “We’re no different
in the Jewish community. How can you be any different? How can you not be
affected by the broader culture? I buy stuff all the time that I neither want
nor need—that’s what the culture is all about.”
Making matters worse, of course, are the new geographic realities of Jewish
life and the collapse of the community’s unifying ideology. To stress the
point, Goldman takes the conversation back to the prints of the yeshiva
students. “These pictures don’t have the same power for younger people,” says
Goldman, citing his own nieces and nephews as an example. “Anti-Semitism
wasn’t a big deal for them growing up. They were much more assimilated and
acculturated.” But, he adds, the answer is not to search for a world that has
passed. “I really think that one of the toughest challenges for those of us
in leadership positions is to free ourselves of our past and be able to look
at the world through the eyes of a twenty- or thirtysomething and see what he
or she is going to want and
Yes, Virginialeh, there
are poor Jews
By Ami Eden
These few sentences strike at the heart of what keeps Goldman up nights and
makes his job so difficult.
“What makes a community really function is that me and you—all of us—have
certain common ground that we stand on,” says Goldman. “We share certain
experiences, traditions and a set of core values. We have the opportunity to
go to Jewish cultural events; our kids go to Jewish camps. We talk with a
shared language. These things are what make up the texture of the community
and make a community successful.” 
Among those taking notice is the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia,
which provided about 30 percent of JFCS’s $9.4-million budget in 1997-98.
Spurred by the JFCS report, which found that the community lacked an adequate
system for tracking the Jewish poor and had managed to assist less than 20
percent of those below the poverty line, Federation established a high-level
task force charged with determining the short- and long-term needs of the
less fortunate.
Ami Eden is news editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
Send your comments to him by clicking here.
