Nyc Jewish Poor Ignored

Sanford Solender, executive vice-president of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, charged here that anti-poverty agencies ignored the Jewish poor in New York City and said his and other organizations were taking legal action to make welfare centers more accessible and more hospitable for poverty-stricken Jews seeking assistance. Solender addressed 1200 delegates attending the biennial convention of the Workmen’s Circle, the national Jewish labor fraternal order, at the Concord Hotel.

He said a survey conducted by the N.Y. Federation disclosed that 270,000 Jews living in the metropolitan area had incomes below the national poverty levels. According to Solender, more than 200,000 Jews in families of four or more earned about $4800 annually and 50 percent of the couples earning $3000 or less a year were aged.

Solender said the majority of the impoverished Jews lived in “hostile ghetto areas: Crown Heights, Brownsville and Morrisania, where they dare not venture from their homes for fear of physical violence.” He contended that elderly Jews were “harassed” at welfare centers by other “minority groups who resent their presence.”

RAP NIXON, KISSINGER FOR GRIEVOUS ERROR

Addressing the opening session of the convention, Harold Ostroff, who was re-elected president of the Workmen’s Circle, charged that “President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger have made a grievous error” when the U.S. voted for an anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council last month “because the Kissinger-Gromyko deal called for such action.” Ostroff added, “We hope it is retrievable. We must demand that it be corrected.” He suggested that “it may be that Secretary of State Kissinger may be leaning over backwards to indicate to the Soviets that his Jewish antecedents are not influencing him with regard to American politics in the Middle East, but he is not being matched by Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko whose hostility against Israel is a historic fact.”

A resolution adopted at the convention urged President Nixon to add the fate of Soviet Jewry to the agenda of his forthcoming visit to Moscow in June. Another resolution urged the U.S. to continue its military and economic aid to Israel. It acknowledged that the Nixon Administration’s foreign policy, especially its response to Israel’s needs during the Yom Kippur War, was much better than its domestic policies. In a message sent to the Workmen’s Circle convention, Premier Golda Meir reaffirmed her nation’s desire for peace but rejected capitulation “to unreasonable demands or compromises of our vital security needs.”

William Stern, the Workmen’s Circle executive director, told the delegates that while other fraternal organizations are reporting declines, “our own organization has taken a sharp and dramatic upward swing.” He said his group has $13 million in assets and a membership of 53,465 nationally. Stern also reported that on May 17 the Workmen’s Circle and the Forward, the only Yiddish daily in this country will move from the lower East Side location after 65 years to a new location in mid-town Manhattan. The move, he said, will cost the Workmen’s Circle more than $500,000.