Jewish free loan funds often run by haredim now serve an expanded clientele that includes people not usually considered part of their communities. But the economic downturn has hit many Jews hard, and as I've reported many times, the Jewish Federations have for the most part failed to respond to the crisis – or even to acknowledge the crisis exists.
Writing in the New York Times, Sam Freedman reports on the rise in the number of Jews using gemachs, free loan funds, to get by during these terrible economic times. Some of these Jews are not Orthodox, but they've found their way to the Orthodox – usually haredi – community seeking help. In part this is because there are so many Chabad Houses. Freedman starts with the story of one such Chabad rabbi, Hirshy Minkowicz:
…39 years old and serving as the rabbi of a Chabad center near Atlanta, Rabbi Minkowicz has done something he never expected: open a gemach that deals primarily with non-Orthodox Jews in a prosperous stretch of suburbia. The reason, quite simply, is the prolonged downturn in the American economy, which has driven up the number of Jews identified by one poverty expert as the “middle-class needy.”
The same phenomenon has appeared in Jewish communities across the country, albeit most often in those with existing Orthodox populations already familiar with the gemach system. This institution rooted in Biblical and Talmudic teachings and named for Hebrew words meaning “bestowal of kindness” (“gemilut chasadim”) is now meeting needs created by such resolutely modern causes as sub-prime mortgages, out-sourcing and credit-default swaps.
“I honestly never thought, in my realm here, to start a gemach,” Rabbi Minkowicz said in a recent interview. “I thought people wouldn’t understand it. It’d be a foreign concept. They hadn’t grown up that way. But definitely, definitely, definitely the economy now is the worst. The 13 years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen people go from a regular life to rags. I’ve seen that up-front and personal.”…
Freedman says requests for food and clothes made to Jewish social services organizations have risen by 40% since the stock market collapse in 2008:
“This area of the middle-class needy has just exploded,” said William E. Rapfogel, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, which covers the New York area. “We’ve seen people who were making $75,000, even $200,000, lose a substantial portion of income. When they lose a job, they get another, but it’s a job for less. They’re so over-leveraged in their homes, they can’t get out. If they sold, they wouldn’t take out a nickel.”
Rapfogel's agency is one of the few Jewish agencies countrywide doing anything substantial to help Jews in severe financial distress, and what the Met Council does is far from enough, as Rapfogel is the first to admit.
He told me several months ago that he'd like to do more, especially in the area of housing for non-disabled, non-elderly, non-mentally-ill, non-substance-abuser adults who have been devasted by the economic collapse.
But he can't.
Why?
Because the Federations, foundations and donors don't seem to care that there are Jewish poor who don't fit the above categories, and there is no federal money available to him for housing.
“People have been so taken by shock,” Rabbi Moshe Meir Weiss of the Agudas Yisroel synagogue told Freedman. “Picture yourself, God forbid, having to take a can of tuna from someone. It’s almost like the soup lines of the Great Depression.”
It is very much like those soup lines but with one major difference – today's lines are almost always hidden from public view.
A family makes a monthly trip to a food shelf, uses food stamps (that Republican now want to cut), and skips meals.
The trip to the food shelf is by appointment. There are no lines.
If things get desperate, the family might catch a meal at a church soup kitchen or beg a family member or friend for help.
We largely don't notice the homeless.
We don't realize that many of them who are not mentally ill or addicts work low paying jobs – McDonald's, Walmart – and live in shelters, under freeway overpasses, on subways or couch surf.
Some of these people once worked in well paying jobs that no longer exist, or in whole industries which no longer exist, at least physically within the borders of the United States.
These men and women and their children are homeless because they can't afford housing, not because they are lazy or addicts or mentally ill.
America cut its housing programs years ago, driven by the same supply side economics theology that brought us reduced federal regulation and enforcement of environmental, health, fiancial, and humane slaughter regulations.
That brought us Enron, Agriprocessors massive humane slaughter law violations, Bernard Madoff, the economic collapse that began in 2008, and the suffering many are experiencing today.
There is no excuse for the government's failures in this crisis, and anyone who takes Jewish law seriously should view Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and their cohort for what they are – people who are acting immorally and amorally.
Our friends on the other side of the isle, including the president, have an agenda that is often more closely aligned with halakha on this issue.
But the president's aloofness and is his political incompetence have made a bad situation much worse than it had to be.
Now is not the time to be cutting food stamps or reducing medicare benefits. It is also not the time to be laying off public sector workers.
There are too many people hurting and there are too many people who are one paycheck away from homelessness.
They are there through no fault of their own.
They are there because America decided to fight two large overseas wars without raising taxes to pay for them, and because an American president and his administration decided not to enforce much of the financial and other regulation already on the books. And they're poor because Wall Street has for decades decided the best way to make money is the Mitt Romney way – take over a company, fire as many (or more) employees as possible, and sell the "revitalized" company for a profit made almost entirely on the backs of the workers who built that company.
These people are poor because they were downsized, Romney-ed, outsourced, and bankrupted out of their jobs, and the jobs they can now get involve flipping burgers part time for $8 an hour without benefits.
Our government is failing them.
But our own non-Orthodox community is also failing the Jewish poor.
The Jewish Federations need to be called to task for their refusal to seriously address the issue of poor Jews – Jews who need help now but who often can't get it because, thanks to the Federations, almost none exists.
On their own, the Federations' leaders will never feel shame for not helping these poor Jews, and they will never change without being pressured to do so, and being forced to acknowledge poor American Jews exist and need their help.