Focus on Issues Plight of the Homeless Jews

Not only have recent improvements in the American economy not “trickled down” to those at the bottom served by the Jewish community’s key agency for the city’s Jewish poor and homeless, but the agency has been “deluged” with appeals from individuals and families “who simply cannot make ends meet,” an official of the agency said today.

Menachem Shayovich, president of the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty, made that comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in reporting on a grant of $200,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to operate emergency shelters and food facilities for the city’s homeless, most of whom are expected to be Jews, including kosher facilities for Jews.

Shayovich said the Coordinating Council was working on such a program in cooperation with the Federation Employment and Guidance Service (FEGS) Joseph Sonnenreich, Council Board chairman, said the $200,000 must be spent by March 31. He said there are few conditions attached to use of the federal funds, other than that their use must be restricted to providing emergency food and shelter.

Rabbi David Cohen, Coordinating Council executive director, stressed repeatedly to the JTA the difficulty of defining what a homeless person is. But, he added, the Council is getting hundreds of “what we call, for lack of a better name, transient homeless.”

Cohen said these have included Jews coming to Brooklyn’s Boro Park section from Israel seeking a possible marriage “for their rapidly aging adult children”; Jews who live in boarding houses or single-room occupancies “whose public entitlements last only two or three weeks”; and immigrants coming without funds or friends because they still believe New York streets “are paved with gold.”

THREE JEWISH PROGRAMS

Adding that the process of determining just who the homeless in New York City are has been started, as the basis for implementing the goals of the FEMA grant, Cohen said there are three Jewish programs providing housing for the homeless, mostly the elderly, which began in the late spring in this year — one sponsored by the Coordinating Council, one by Project Dorot and one by Respite House.

Dorot is a volunteer college student group, organized on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, aided by the Jewish Association for College Youth (JACY), an affiliate of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.

The three projects were started in the late spring of this year and the number of persons needing shelter was expected to be relatively small during the warm summer months. But both the Dorot Project and Respite House, each with a 14-bed capacity, have been housing an average of 10 persons per night.

Cohen said the Coordinating Council project, consisting of three rented apartments in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section and a room in Brighton Beach, started in early July, “currently offers II beds, of which we have been filling an average of six to nine beds a night.” He said the agency had the capacity to develop more bed space and would do so “in the near future.”

Cohen reported that initial results, as case records are built up for the coming winter months, “are confirming expectations.” He said “we are finding homeless Jews, many of whom are between 20 and 50, most of whom are unemployed and some of whom exhibit signs of mental disability.”

He said that during the height of the “homeless season,” the recent winter months, there were in New York City some 50 religious institutions providing shelter for homeless persons and that five of them were synagogues, using volunteers and each housing five to eight people each night. He reported most of the religious institutions stopped offering their programs in the spring “but intend on opening up again in the winter months.”

240-850 JEWISH FAMILIES ARE HOMELESS

The raw details of the treatment of the Jewish homeless were related in a separate report, prepared by Cohen and Andrew Frank, the Coordinating Council operations director, in which reference was made to a recent report by the Federation’s Task Force on the Homeless which mentioned results of two studies sponsored by the New York State Office of Mental Health and the Human Resource Administration (HRA), declaring that 2 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively, of the city’s homeless were Jewish.

“Based on overall estimates of a city-wide homeless population of between 12,000 and 36,000, this accounts for approximately 240 to 850 Jewish families,” according to the Cohen-Frank report.

They also reported that field studies on the Jewish homeless “claim that many of their clients” have never used municipally-operated facilities for the homeless “due to the horrendous reputation and fear that these facilities engender.”

Some specific information about privately-operated shelters in Manhattan cited in the Cohen-Frank report included an estimate that 33 percent of the users of the Goddard-Riverside Church outreach program were Jews. The Oliveri Center for Homeless Women estimated 10 percent of its population was Jewish.

The Midtown Outreach Program Manhattan Bowery Corp. claimed that from November, 1981, to July, 1982, from 139 to 159 persons, or around 40 percent of users ever 60 were Jews, and that 56 persons or 80 percent over 70 were Jews.

A Federation report said the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services (JBFCS) serves an average of six homeless persons a week or 300 a year. The Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (JASA) reported a caseload of between 65 and 85 annually.

CRISIS INTERVENTION AND CASE MANAGEMENT

Shayovich said “crisis intervention and case management services” will be provided to beneficiaries of the FEMA-financed project by 20 locally-based neighborhood Jewish Community Councils affiliated with the Coordinating Council and “long-term case planning and follow-up will be responsibility of the FEGS Homeless Project.”

Crisis intervention was defined as dealing with the immediate problem, getting the homeless person housed and fed, doing an initial intake and assessment of the person’s problems and needs, and starting, where appropriate, the process of application for public entitlements.

Case management was described as coordinating the provision of a package of services to a needy person receiving such services from a variety of sources “and maintaining contact and ensuring adequate follow-up on whatever plan of service is agreed upon” for the needy Jew.

Cohen said most of the 20 Jewish Community Councils, located throughout the city’s five boroughs, operate store-front, walk-in multi-service centers. He said all of them have helped homeless persons at one time or another. He said some councils provide crisis intervention services and daily checks on persons located in shelters near their offices.

The Federation recently allocated $110,000 to implement its Federation Homeless Project, handled by FEGS, Altro Health and Rehabilitation Services and the JBFCS.

Cohen said this was an out-reach and case-management program which does not directly operate shelters for homeless Jews but the Coordinating Council project, co-sponsored by FEGS, “now provides them with direct access to shelter and they in turn provide their services to our clients.”

RESULTS OF COLLABORATIVE UNDERTAKINGS

In a joint statement on the FEMA grant, Alfred Miller, FEGS executive director, and Cohen said the effort was “the result of collaborative undertakings by the organized Jewish community to deal with this most urgent problem.”

They added that the FEGS Homeless Project is funded by the Federation and is co-sponsored by JBFCS and Altro. The Metropolitan Councils’ affiliations include “direct relationships” with the community councils, JASA, the YM-YWHA and Jewish community centers in all five boroughs.

“By providing not only shelter and food, but appropriate follow-up services located in neighborhoods where the homeless feel most comfortable, we hope to develop a network of emergency-response capability coupled with a full array of professional social services,” Miller and Cohen said.