The Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty served notice today that it will continue to press federal agencies for monies to aid the Jewish elderly poor who, it charged, have been overlooked in the allocation of funds by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).
A spokesman for the Council, a coordinating agency representing 30 major national and local Jewish organizations, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that federal agencies, including the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) will be taking over certain anti-poverty programs being phased out of OEO by the Nixon administration.
He said demands will be made on these agencies to fund programs for the hitherto neglected Jewish poor, mainly in large urban areas. The programs being phased out of OEO and transferred to HEW include senior opportunity services. Jerome Becker, president of the Council and a commissioner with the City Commission on Human Rights, emphasized his opposition to the dismemberment of OEO as called for in President Nixon’s proposed budget. “But we insist that OEO initiate programs to provide assistance to the Jewish poor who are not now being served,” he said.
Rabbi Jack S. Cohen, executive director of the Council, noted that the OEO was organized to provide assistance on a neighborhood basis. In New York City there are 26 designated poverty areas, only two of which have a substantial Jewish population.
ASSISTANCE TO JEWISH POOR FRUSTRATED
An amendment providing special assistance programs for eligible poor living outside designated poverty areas–which includes many impoverished elderly Jews–was enacted by Congress last year. The measure was sponsored by Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R. NY) and Rep. James Scheuer (D. NY).
According to a statement issued by the Council, the guidelines for the allocation of funds under the Economic Opportunity Act contains criteria that do not apply to the elderly Jewish poor; nor do the variations on those criteria employed by the City of New York. The latter are the number of welfare recipients in a neighborhood; the percentage of juvenile delinquents; and the number of births in municipal hospitals. “It is equally clear that these guidelines do not take account of the Jewish poor,” the statement said.
The Javits-Scheuer amendment was intended to relieve the inequities by providing assistance to “older persons and other low income individuals who do not reside in low income areas and who are not being effectively served by other programs.” The Council’s statement charged the OEO leadership with frustrating attempts to develop programs of assistance to the Jewish poor under the amendment.
It cited a letter from the OEO to Sen. Javits and the National Center for Jewish Policy Studies which pointed out that no money was appropriated expressly to implement the Javits-Scheuer amendment and that the $790.2 million appropriated for the entire OEO budget provided only for “refunding (existing) grants at their present program level.”
The Council’s statement noted that the very basis of the amendment “is the recognition that funds for present programs have been inequitably distributed and that certain groups of poor have been unfairly denied the benefits of OEO assistance in the absence of new monies, the redress called for, then, is a reallocation of funds to provide programs for those not now being served.” the statement said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
