What I wrote Friday is accurate with regard to families and adults who became homeless because of the economic downturn or because of illness or old age, and those who become homeless because of mental illness or drug addiction. But it missed a large segment of homeless Jews, one you probably do not know exists. But it does.
Yudel, someone I know has worked for years to deal with this problem and who has extensive first hand experience unmatched by anyone else in our community, writes in response to my pre-Yom Kippur post on Jewish homelessness:
…There are essentially no shelters for Jews and for the homeless non Jews.
In the boroughs of new york there are thousands of homeless underground Jewish teens.
The only shelter for them is Covenant House which sleeps about 350 kids 18-21 every night.
There is no outreach other than the work Dorot does [to elderly homeless Jews] and the like. There is absolutely no more street outreach and in LA alone the streets are packed with Jewish kids sleeping under freeways and squats.
This started long before the recession. This has been going on endlessly and went very down hill when Father Bruce Ritter was wrongly accused of untoward sexual behavior at Covenant House.
There was in the 80's street outreach and a drop in shelter as well as mentoring program for frum kids and other Jewish kids that worked the entire metro area and had an office on Coney Island Avenue.
The Jewish Family Institute.
It died of course because very few people wanted to fund it and of course others wanted to deny there was a problem. The city would not fund it because it was Jewish.
They did incredible work. Heroic rescues. Risked their lives literally, were attacked and targeted for murder, et. al. but when Covenant House lost Ritter they too lost their funding.…
There are no functioning Jewish programs to deal with this problem.
Why?
I think the answer is that. like so many other crucial problems in the Jewish community, Jewish community leaders would prefer to believe the problem does not exist.
That willful blindness is not exclusively Jewish. It extends to politicians on the city, state and national levels; to churches; to community service organizations; and to all of us, including me.
The key purpose of all religion is to form communities that care for those less fortunate, for people who, for whatever reasons, cannot at this time care for themselves.
Why our community has to among those who fail so many of these desperate people is beyond me.
And why Federation leaders think they are somehow exempt from responsibility for these kids is something only a skilled psychoanalyst could really explain.
And, for those of you who say Chabad helps these kids, you're wrong.
Individual Chabad Houses occasionally help individual kids, just as individual Chabad Houses sometimes help other homeless individuals.
Chabad has a shelter in LA – although it doesn't address the problem Yudel noted.
Chabad in Cincinnati also has a homeless shelter – for families only.
But there is no comprehensive, dedicated effort on the part of Chabad nationwide.
What is true, however, is that their sporadic, non-comprehensive efforts are still better than the Federations, who do nothing at all to help these kids.