When it comes to supporting family- and woman-friendly legislation, the leaders of Jewish communal organizations wax eloquent.
But a survey of Jewish communal and religious organizations reveals that their pro-family philosophies often do not extend very far when it comes to their own employees.
In fact, there is a dramatic disparity between the rhetoric of Jewish groups and the reality within their own four walls.
Most national Jewish organizations do not have any paid parental leave, and some have no policies in place regarding leave.
The Family and Medical Leave Act, which was signed into law as one of President Clinton’s first official acts and went into effect in August, mandates that businesses with 50 or more employees allow workers to take up to 12 unpaid weeks out of the office after having or adopting a child, or in case an immediate family member is ill.
The act, which also had been adopted the previous year by Congress but vetoed by President Bush, had the singular distinction of being backed by every mainstream Jewish group, said Diana Aviv, associate executive director of National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.
NJCRAC is the umbrella group representing 13 national and 117 community Jewish agencies on matters of domestic and international concern.
Many of the family leave act’s Jewish organizational advocates termed the mandated unpaid leave a “modest” pro-family step.
Yet not one of the national Jewish agencies surveyed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency offers employees any paid time off. This forces staffers to hoard vacation and sick time if they plan to have children, and to try to support a family without an income once the baby is born and the accrued time runs out.
Two of the Jewish community’s staunchest advocates for pro-family policies have no clear family leave policy.
THE ‘CORNERSTONE’ OF JEWISH LIFE
NJCRAC, which has long advocated the family leave law, allows its employees a single paid week off, which is deducted from sick time, upon the birth of a child.
Beyond that it allows no parental leave, paid or unpaid. And vacation cannot be accrued from year to year, prohibiting someone anticipating a child from accumulating time to be used later.
“Most of the women hired here have been past childbearing age,” said Sanford Gutkin, NJCRAC’s director of administration and finance.
NJCRAC is not alone in its lack of a clear parental leave policy.
Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations, wrote to Bush in September 1992, strongly urging him to sign the act into law.
“The Reform movement fervently believes that no one should ever be forced to neglect familial obligations because one fears losing one’s job,” he wrote.
“The family is the cornerstone of Jewish tradition and Jewish life. We must cherish our families, our children and our parents. We must celebrate the dedication that family members show by working to support one another and caring for each other when they are ill or hurt,” he wrote.
Yet there is no mention of leave for maternity or paternity in the UAHC’s personnel policies, said Bob Koppel, UAHC’s business manager. No one gets any paid time, if they are able to negotiate with their boss for any time off at all.
There is “a somewhat unclear, non-specified leave policy for senior staff, as executives, that says if you have a need for leave you can request it and it is not unreasonably held back,” he said.
Any unpaid time taken by clerical or technical staffers is not included when their total length of service is computed.
The lack of a clearly delineated policy, protecting employees’ jobs for a reasonable amount of time, may have something to do with the fact that, according to Koppel, no female employee of the UAHC has ever taken more than several weeks off after giving birth.
CRYING ‘GEVALT’ OVER BIRTHRATE
Robert Lifton, president of the American Jewish Congress, also wrote to Bush urging him to sign the family leave act.
“More and more Americans are finding themselves forced to choose between caring for their loved ones and keeping a job to meet the family’s financial needs,” he wrote.
The AJCongress provides no paid leave. But it does allow employees to apply accrued vacation and sick time to their leave and will allow someone to take up to a year off in the case of a birth or a family member’s illness, and return to the same job, according to Marvin Besner, director of administration.
Similarly, the American Jewish Committee praised the enactment of the act in February.
Mimi Alperin, chair of AJCommittee’s national affairs commission, applauded “Washington’s new willingness to forge pro-family policies, not simply talk about them.”
The AJCommittee provides no paid time off to employees who have just had children.
It does allow employees to use accrued vacation time during their unpaid leave, said Carol Buglio, director of AJCommittee’s New Jersey area office and president of the organization’s in-house union.
AJCommittee also allows employees to use sick days to care for a sick child. Up to 60 sick days can be accrued for later use, said Buglio, and after 15 years of employment, up to 80 sick days can be accrued.
“If the Jewish community is as concerned with issues of continuity and identity as it says it is, then we have to look at our own organizations,” said Ann Lewis, chair of the American Jewish Congress Commission for Women’s Equality.
“We make it difficult for Jewish women professionals to be pregnant and have babies in a community where we’re crying ‘gevalt’ over the lack of Jewish babies,” she 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.
