One Milwaukee Woman Finds Way to Help Singles in Her Community

Dianne Spector is tired of meeting friends in the supermarket and lamenting the fact that their children are not meeting other young Jewish singles.

Her 23-year-old daughter, like many of her friend’s children, moved back to Milwaukee after graduating from college.

Milwaukee’s Jewish community has few events to offer its singles. And because the city of 1 million souls has a Jewish population of only about 25,000, there is little chance that Jewish singles will met other unmarried Jews at work or at bars, said Spector.

Then Spector saw in her local newspaper a federation “wish list” of programs it was trying to fund, including $30,000 for interfaith programming and just one- third as much devoted to singles.

She also saw a Jewish community center program with activities scheduled for every conceivable population, including intermarrieds, but none for young single adults.

So she decided to do something about it.

Spector, 50, is not a power player in Milwaukee’s Jewish establishment. She is not a federation bigwig, nor does she have the financial resources to underwrite an effort on her own.

But she did have an idea – to organize activities where Jewish singles could meet and to create a system to let them know what was available to them in Milwaukee.

With only her idea in hand, Spector asked everyone she knew for ideas, found out about what some other mid-size Jewish communities are doing for singles, and then approached her Jewish federation for some help.

She was shunted from staffer to staffer, and finally rebuffed and told “just because you have an idea, what makes you think you could make it happen?” she said.

Undaunted, she moved forward on her own.

With a handful of friends, she arranged a Yom Kippur break-the-fast for singles. Their only publicity was announcements from four synagogue pulpits on the High Holy Days and a one-time ad in the local Jewish paper.

The response was more enthusiastic than Spector had imagined it could be.

One hundred and fifty men and women in their late 20s and 30s came to the potluck buffet. The woman who hosted the event in her apartment building’s party room even met someone promising.

Since then, under the auspices of the Milwaukee Jewish Link, as it is now called, Spector has arranged two books clubs – one for singles under 40, one for singles over 40 – which meet in a local bookstore/cafe.

Weekly volleyball games will soon begin at the Jewish Community Center.

Spector, a native of the city, describes herself as a “street-corner psychologist” and, from listening to what her daughter’s friends say, has come to some conclusions about Jewish singles.

They don’t want to hear directly from a federation, she said. “There’s the perception that if their names get into the hands of federation they’ll be hit on for money.”

She has also found that there is little continuity when singles coordinate their own programming, and even when a Jewish community center or federation hires a part-time worker to coordinate efforts.

There is a lot of turnover among the part-time coordinators, who are most often young single women who get married and leave the position. When singles coordinate their own programming, Spector said, they lose interest when they marry.

Even while unmarried, they have unique stresses in their lives as they get settled in careers and as some deal with being single parents. As a result, they have little time to organize singles activities, she said.

Instead, Spector’s vision is to have Jewish singles telling coordinators that kind of activities they will come to and to have settled people organizing things.

“If we can get non-single, rooted people working with rooted agencies and synagogues, getting direction from singles, I know we can be a major help to them,” she said.

Spector said that her goal is to get young people to want to stay in Milwaukee because they fell they have a future there, not necessarily to make marriages.

“If that happens, wonderful, but the way I’m trying to market this is that the future of the Milwaukee Jewish community depends on our creating opportunities for people to meet,” she said.

“Who will join our synagogues and organizations and support our charities if they don’t? We’re talking about financial implications for the community. It’s a real Jewish continuity issue,” she said.

The Milwaukee Jewish Federation, after much lobbying on Spector’s part, has contributed only $5,000 to her efforts so far.

“Federations generally cannot turn on a dime and respond to requests,” said Rick Meyer, executive vice president of the federation. “There are a lot of constituencies out there, and each one has a justifiable and legitimate point of view about what the priorities should be.

“We’re still not sure where singles fit in with (our priorities vis a vis) intermarrieds, the elderly, etc. That will be determined through planning task forces,” he said.

According to Spector, though, seed money for her singles project is not enough.

“All federations have money,” she said. “We have to get them to recognize singles as a top priority in every single community. When are they going to wake up?”