The president of the Queens Jewish Community Council claimed today that lower echelon officials of the Department of Housing and Urban Development had “set their sights” on Forest Hills as the site for a controversial 840-family low income housing project that is bitterly opposed by the predominently Jewish community there. Dr. Alvin M. Lashinsky told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his group had learned from the office of Sen. James L. Buckley (Cons.-R., N.Y.) that the HUD people were so anxious to use Forest Hills as a pilot project for the scattering of low income housing in non-ghetto neighborhoods that they were willing to spend double the amount budgeted if necessary.
Dr. Lashinsky said that HUD Secretary George W. Romney was apparently unaware of these developments. He wrote to Romney last Thursday urging him to cut off funds for the housing project pending completion of a review that the Secretary promised last week at the urging of Buckley. HUD officials were not available today for comment. Dr. Lashinsky said in a telephone interview that Buckley’s office gave no indication why Forest Hills, a middle class area of well kept apartment buildings and private homes, was selected for the pilot project.
He charged that the selection was made because HUD officials were convinced that Jews would not react as vehemently as other white ethnic groups to the influx of welfare recipients and other poor, mainly black. They haven’t done so in the past, Dr. Lashinsky said. He claimed that for that reason it was the deliberate policy of the City Housing Authority to locate welfare families in predominently Jewish neighborhoods, According to Dr. Lashinsky he was told of this policy privately by certain high city officials who asked him not to disclose their names.
In his letter to Romney, Dr. Lashinsky wrote, “Three Jewish middle class areas have been selected discriminatively for this (housing) program while the other eight sites have been killed in response to other ethnic community pressures.” He described Forest Hills as “the key to the survival of the Jewish community of the Borough of Queens.”
ORTHODOX GROUPS URGE DELAY
The emergence of the Forest Hills project as a Jewish issue began last Sept. with the release of a joint statement by the QJCC and the Rabbinic Association of Queens charging that the project “seriously threatened the continued existence of the Forest Hills Jewish community.” Several rabbis in the area, however, differed sharply with the QJCC and one of them. Rabbi Usher Kirschblum of the Kew Gardens Jewish Center, resigned from the QJCC over the issue. A City Housing Authority official told the JTA at the time that there was no truth to the QJCC’s charge that the authority was deliberately locating low income housing in Jewish neighborhoods.
Feelings have been running high in Forest Hills for the past two months. They erupted into violence last Thursday night when hundreds of area residents massed at the construction site and hurled rocks and torches at a trailer of the J.P. Carlin Construction Co. which is about to start work on the project. Mayor John V. Lindsay termed the demonstration “deplorable.” The city obtained a temporary injunction to prevent further interference with the construction.
The controversy took on wider ramifications when Buckley intervened on the side of the protesting Forest Hills residents. It brought the Conservative law-maker into an alliance with a liberal Democrat, Rep. Benjamin S. Rosenthal of Queens who has also been urging suspension of the project pending review. Dr. Lashinsky told the JTA that unsolicited expressions of support have come from outside the city. In addition, 10 national Orthodox Jewish organizations have joined in urging delay in the construction of the project.
In a petition to Romney, leaders of these groups urged the delay until they could meet personally with him to discuss “the issue which is of deep concern to the Jewish people of New York City.” The 10 groups were; National Council of Young Israel, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbinical Alliance of America. Torah Umesorah, Religious Zionists of America, Agudath Israel, Poale Agudath Israel, National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs and the Association of Orthodox Scientists.
Dr. Lashinsky and other spokesmen for the Forest Hills community denied that their opposition to the project was racist. They noted that black families already lived in Forest Hills and that there were some welfare families there as well. Their main objections, they said, were centered on the magnitude of the $33 million federally financed project, the largest of its kind in the US.
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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.
