Focus on Issues Jewish Family Service Agency Study Reveals the Emergence of Dependent Jewish Clients

The impact of cuts in public welfare benefits, stemming from “shifts in federal and state priorities,” is producing” a newly emerging group of dependent Jewish-clients” who are receiving help from a major Jewish family service. The agency, the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services (JBFCS), which has just concluded a study of this group, defines such Jews as constituting “the new poor.”

The JBFCS study sought to learn how many Jewish, non-Jewish white, Black and Hispanic families on the agency’s rolls received some form of public benefits in 1982; how many of them had their benefits significantly reduced; which communities were hardest hit by employment and benefit losses; and which public benefits were most often cut.

Dr. Jerome Goldsmith, JBFCS executive vice president, reporting on the study, said the professionally-designed survey form was distributed by caseworkers in the agency’s 12 community-based mental health clinics, called Madeleine Borg Counseling Services, which serve a heterogenous collection of families in four boroughs, seeking help for marital, parent-child and personal adjustment problems.

A JBFCS spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the agency does not have Madeleine Borg Counseling Service clinics in Queens, where such services are provided by the Jewish Community Services of Long Island. Both family agencies are affiliates of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York.

A KEY QUESTION

Caseworkers in the 12 clinics distributed the survey forms during the week of September 6 and began collecting completed surveys for the week starting December 13. The returned surveys provided detailed information on 1,645 households.

A key question for which the survey sought answers was the impact of the cuts on Jewish families on JBFCS rolls receiving public aid.

The study showed that 541 households of the total 1,645 had been receiving public benefits and 241 of those 541 households were Jewish, compared to 96 non-Jewish white households; 119 Black and 85 Hispanic.

Of the 175 households which suffered cuts during 1982, 78 were Jewish; compared with 26 non-White Jewish; 39 Black; 30 Hispanic and two ethnicity unknown. A summary of the two tables indicated that the largest category both of those receiving aid and getting cuts in aid were Jewish families.

Public benefits were listed as AFDC (aid to family dependents); home relief; Supplementary Security Income (SSI); disability insurance; medicaid, the medical-hospital government-funded program for the indigent; food stamps, public day care; and subsidized lunch programs. The only other specific references to Jews in the study concerned impact of loss of aid and joblessness.

Focussing on the disappearance of the Reagan Administration’s commitment to a safety net for those in need, the study found that a third of those receiving some form of public benefit had recently lost those benefits. More than 12 percent of all the 1,654 households had experienced either job loss or cuts of hours of work or both — “more than one-third higher than the city average.”

The study speculated that “public benefit losses seem to be beginning to have what could be a devastating effect on the marginal family, the new poor,” elsewhere defined as including marginal Jewish families slipping down the economic scale because of the cuts “who were managing to survive with a little assistance but who are now falling behind more each day.”

Specifically, Goldsmith said, “nearly one-third of the Jewish caseload receiving benefits lost all or part of that help in 1982,” the newly-emerging group vulnerable to the loss of family support which constituted “the new poor.”

OTHER CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY

The study also found that the community with the highest rate of joblessness was the predominantly Orthodox Boro Park section of Brooklyn. Other conclusions of the study, though couched in general terms, clearly applied to the Jewish households examined in the study, though no specific reference was made to Jews.

For example, the study confirmed that Blacks and Hispanics “continue to be hardest hit” but that “lower and middle class families, up until recently able to sustain themselves financially,” were “beginning to fall through the ‘safety net’.”

As human service budget reductions have gone into effect, agency caseworkers have reported that “frustration and despair confront many, many of these families, just at the time the resources to service them are shrinking drastically.”

“The cumulative effect of under and unemployment on families is creating additional stress and economic hardship,” the report said. “These families now require access to public benefits and human services, both of which are simultaneously eroding.”