A spokesman for Mayor Abraham Beame said today that city officials were looking into charges that a “disproportionate number of Jewish employes” were being dismissed or were being laid off “for budgetary reasons.” The spokesman added that the city administration had no reason to believe the charges were true.
The charges were made by the Association of Jewish Anti-Poverty Workers. The agency’s executive director, S. Elly Rosen, asserted that in recent months the agency had received many complaints from Jewish city employes about such dismissals. Rosen said the AJAPW had contacted a number of key Jewish civil service employes, asking them for information.
Subsequently, the AJAPW made a formal complaint to Mayor Beame, the city and state Commission on Human Rights and the Department of Justice civil rights division concerning hiring and firing practices in the city’s Office of Neighborhood Government.
The AJAPW asserted that John Carty, Jr., named by the Beame administration as director of ONG, dismissed 38 employes, of whom 36 were Jewish and that, shortly afterward, he hired 33 new employes, none of whom were Jewish. Rosen asserted that while during the prior administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay, the ONG office had 35 percent in Jewish employes, the Beame Administration reduced that to 17 percent.
Rosen said ONG was chosen for the first study because it is an agency “directly involved with the neighborhoods of New York City, where Jews have a major stake for survival.”
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.
