Calls for All Inclusive Type of Organization to Meet Jewish Needs

The need for a change in case work to meet the changing order was stressed here yesterday by Harry L. Lurie, director of the Bureau of Jewish Social Research, at the thirty-third New York State Conference on Social Work.

“There is a growing reaction against the enlarged responsibility for details of family life assumed by the social case worker,” Dr. Lurie declared. “We are beginning to realize now in social case work that we have over-emphasized personal factors and influences and have disregarded or have been little concerned with the equally important, impersonal factors and impersonal relationships of the individual to the social and economic order.

“There is needed a more effective integration of the case work method with programs of social work. We should begin to define the social problems for which we have used the case work method in terms of the lack of effectiveness of existing social and economic provisions for satisfactory economic, family and social life.

“We need to begin to think in terms of organizing social services which may use case work and relinquish the assumption that a case work agency is, in itself, the key to the solution of major social problems and less of a technician, skilled in the methods of adapting individuals to the status quo of social and economic organization,” Dr. Lurie declared.

the local community leaders gathered to launch the ten-day drive for raising funds for 1933 welfare relief in the city, stressed the need to support the various charitable and welfare agencies of the city. He stated that upon these agencies rests the good of society, the betterment of rising generation and the citizenship of the future. The work of helpful care and guidance is most needed in times like these and must go on unhampered, for if it should be handicapped by shortage of funds, it would have a disastrous effect in the future. Only by supporting the Chest can the communities help the present and protect the future, he concluded.

That same evening, Dr. Lowenstein was the honorary guest and speaker at a good-will dinner at the Temple Society of Concord, sponsored in his honor by the joint synagogical organizations, the Brotherhood of the Temple Society of Concord and the Men’s Club of the Temple Adath Yeshurn, at which Rabbi Benjamin Friedman presided.

Dr. Lowenstein’s talk there was based largely around the question, “What shall be the future duty of the Jewish Federation?” raised by Moses Winkelstein, president of the Syracuse Community Chest and Council, and of the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies in Syracuse.

Dr. Lowenstein bemoaned the fact that American Jewry lacks leadership. There are altogether too many Jewish Federations and activities. What the Jewish life requires today, he declared, is an all-inclusive type of organization that shall deal not only with the social and charitable side of Jewish life but also with its educational, religious and Zionistic aspirations. Federations as they are now, lack the full, all-inclusive Jewish activities. With the immigration doors closed, we are becoming, he said, a unified, homogeneous group, and as such we need an up-to-date form of organization.

The question should a Federation merge with the Chest, of course depends largely upon the community itself, he continued. For large cities, it is impractical, and for other cities, not until the Federation had fully developed itself, because aggressive as the Jewish people are, the budget limitation of the Chests would retard their particular advancement, and then there are specific Jewish problems that could only be dealt with by the Federation alone, he concluded.