A considerable drop in relief expenditures of forty-two Jewish family agencies for the first eight months of this year is noted in a report made public yesterday by the Bureau of Jewish Social Research.
The monthly average for the January-to-August period this year was $237,153, as compared with $460,116 for the same months in 1933, the report states.
While the Bureau statement admits that the largest single factor in this drop has been the shifting of the major share of Jewish dependency in Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis and San Francisco to public agencies in those cities, it points out that even with these communities eliminated from consideration, the decrease varies between 20 and 31.3 per cent monthly Total declines, figures show, range between 37.7 per cent in August and 51.5 per cent in June.
An equally striking feature of the report is the fact that there were only 14,329 families under care of the forty-two agencies in June, 1934, as compared with 21,911 families for the same month of the preceding year.
The Bureau points out, however, that although the number of relief cases has been much smaller each month, as compared with last year, cases designated under a “service only” heading proportionately have decreased less sharply. The drop in this group has been between 23.6 and 35.1 per cent this year for all cities, and between 12 and 18 per cent for all except the four above-mentioned cities.
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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.