Gifts to MJF’s community campaign help renew Jews — body and soul
It would be tough enough for Lydia, a Jewish woman in the republic of Moldova, to support herself on a $12-a-month pension. But she is trying to raise her two grandchildren — Boris, 11, and Irena, 16 — on it as well.
“I had to pick through my neighbors’ garbage pails for leftovers,” Lydia told the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which put her story in its “Yearbook 2003: JDC in the Former Soviet Union.” “It hurt me very much to feed these beautiful children from other people’s garbage, but what choice did I have?”
This is not a unique situation among the Jews there. According to the JDC publication, some 20 to 40 percent of Moldovan Jewish children are undernourished.
And while Moldova is currently the poorest of the new republics of the FSU, generally increasing numbers of Jewish children in the FSU are in trouble, according to Arieh Doobov, director of special projects for the JDC’s FSU department.
In an interview with The Chronicle during a visit to Milwaukee last week, part of a ten-day tour of the U.S., Doobov said his colleagues are “getting more calls for help” in issues involving children — everything from providing decent food to purchasing clothes so children can attend school with dignity, to helping children with physical handicaps or serious illnesses.
Initially, Doobov said, JDC staff had thought that Jewish families with young children would emigrate to Israel or elsewhere while the elderly would stay behind and need help. Therefore, JDC had focused on assisting the Jewish elderly, some 250,000 of them across the FSU, most of them on bare subsistence incomes, and of whom some 27,000 are homebound.
But now, with more and more calls coming regarding the young among the FSU’s one to two million Jews, Doobov said the JDC has launched new initiatives to reach this population, while at the same time continuing to serve the elderly.
Children’s Initiative
The FSU has a tiny minority of wealthy people; a small and struggling middle class who lack incomes that would be considered middle class in the U.S.; and a “vast majority” (70 to 80 percent, Doobov said) who are impoverished or close to it, living “hand to mouth.”
It is also a place where the overall infant mortality rate is “three or four times higher” than in Western Europe or the U.S., which “indicates a lot about general health care,” said Doobov.
The Jewish community is “a bit better off” than the general population because it is “more urbanized,” living primarily in 20 to 40 “urban centers” and having more people “closer to the middle class group,” said Doobov. Still, “the poorest Jews in the world live in the FSU,” he said.
The JDC is working hard to help them. It recently launched what its Web site calls “The Children’s Initiative,” which has three basic operations:
• An “S.O.S. Emergency Assistance” project to provide for urgent short-term needs (such as medicine and clothing).
• A variety of pilot projects in community support for children that include a nutrition project in Moldova that has helped feed Lydia’s two grandchildren and some 2,000 others.
• Support for the children’s homes that local Orthodox communities have created to house orphans and other at-risk children.
All this is in addition to the projects JDC already runs in the FSU, which include:
• Some 174 Hesed welfare centers, which provide both nutrition and social outlets for the elderly.
• The 182 Jewish Community Centers, ranging in size from dedicated buildings to one apartment, which Doobov called the “incubators” of a renewed Jewish community as defined by FSU Jews themselves.
• Family retreats, 55 Jewish kindergartens, 184 Jewish libraries and 27 Hillel centers for Jewish students that the JDC created or helped create.
All this work is devoted to present conditions and needs. But JDC is also looking to the future of the FSU community.
Doobov said that if present trends continue, the FSU community will shrink in one generation to about 750,000 and have a more “normal” age distribution than the one it has now, which is skewed toward the elderly.
Because of that, the JDC is also working for “Jewish renewal,” partly by trying to foster creation of local leadership and by making sure its programs are “locally run.”
“Only if FSU Jews make the decisions,” and the programs are “authentic and meaningful” to them will they succeed, said Doobov. “No imported model is going to work.”
But paying for all this is not something that can be done locally yet. “There is a misperception that Russian Jews are doing well,” but they are not, Doobov said. To charge for any of the services would discourage many people from using them, he said.
Nevertheless, as difficult a struggle as it is, Doobov said he and his colleagues are “privileged to do this work,” which helps “right the historical injustice” that 70 years of communist rule have done to the Jews of the FSU. “Every day, we bring more Jews to the Jewish people,” Doobov said.
And they recognize that it is the Jewish federations of the U.S. that “allow us to do” this work. “We are emissaries of the federations,” Doobov said.
And federations like Milwaukee’s recognize that as well.
“Clearly for us there is an unbroken chain that links one generation to the next, ties one community to the next, and that gives us an opportunity to express ourselves as Jews,” said Jerry Benjamin, chair of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel and Overseas Committee, which helps determine the percentage of the annual campaign allocated for those needs.
Moreover, “I’ve traveled in many of these countries,” said Benjamin. “Everyplace I went I’ve found these wonderful professionals who are very aware that it was our campaigns that make it possible for them to do the work they do.”
The Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s “core allocation” for its two overseas partners — the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel — in the 2003-2004 fiscal year was $2,127,600. According to MJF executive vice president Richard H. Meyer, the United Jewish Communities divides such allocations, with 25 percent going to JDC and 75 percent to JAFI.
In addition, said Meyer, the MJF gives “about $200,000” to JDC for special projects and from “partnered grants” from the Jewish Community Foundation, the Milwaukee Jewish community’s central endowment fund.
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