Grant for Jewish Poor Does Not End Anti-poverty Bias, Says Rosen

S. Elly Rosen, executive director of the Association of Jewish Anti-Poverty Workers, said today he welcomed the city’s $250,000 grant to aid the Jewish poor here, but that it was not enough and could not cancel out the continuing “discrimination” by the city against them. “Although we are pleased with the grant and feel certain a lot of poor Jews will be helped,” Rosen told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “this doesn’t clean the slate for the discrimination against Jews in the city’s anti-poverty program.”

Rosen, who made similar comments yesterday when Mayor John V. Lindsay announced the grant, said “nothing has been done” about Jews’ being “looked out of the poverty program,” and “we will not accept the grant as a substitute.” He was referring to the city’s program of aid to 26 official poverty areas; many of the city’s needy Jews live outside those areas. Rosen cited Brownsville, Bronx River and Morrisania as sections where aid to poor Jews is “sorely needed.”

Rosen, whose association is a constituent organization of the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty, which will administer the $250,000 grant, said of Jerome Becker and Rabbi Jack Cohen, chairman and executive director of the Council: “I commend them on the great work they’ve done for the Jewish poor.”