Jewish residents of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn will have their first opportunity tomorrow to help create machinery through which the area’s poor Jews will be able to benefit from New York City’s anti-poverty programs.
The occasion will be an election to choose a planning council which will subsequently organize a Community Corporation to represent the Crown Heights residents in seeking funds for anti-poverty projects. The Crown Heights section is one of the city’s 24 designated poverty areas, but it has no community-wide structure to seek poverty funds.
Crown Heights has 225,000 residents, of whom a majority are Jews. A substantial, but unknown, number of the area’s estimated 125,000 Jews are in income categories defined as “poor” by the Community Development Agency, a unit in the city’s Human Resources Administration, which is the central agency for all city anti-poverty programs. Negroes and Puerto Ricans are the major non-White elements in Crown Heights.
The election tomorrow, to be held in three Crown Heights public schools, will choose 24 members of the planning council which, pending creation of the Community Corporation, will serve as an interim corporation, with authority to review all pending anti-poverty projects for the area.
Under direction of a recently-organized Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, three slates of Jewish candidates, out of a total of six planned slates, will be offered at the election. Under CDA guidelines, each of the six districts into which the area is divided must elect one high income member to the planning council, two low income members and one youth member. The three Jewish slates will offer 12 candidates.
Anti-poverty officials arranged circulars about the election in English, Spanish and French for the area’s non-Jewish residents. The Crown Heights JCC assumed responsibility for leaflets in English and Yiddish for the area’s Jews, distributing them by the thousand. The principal effort by the JCC to inform Crown Heights Jews about the election, and its importance has been emphasized through the area’s 75 synagogues.
The Crown Heights JCC is a volunteer organization, which uses donated space in the synagogue of Young Israel of Eastern Parkway as its headquarters.
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.
