When Laurie M. Kramer decided in 1988 to leave her job as assistant director of the St. Paul Jewish Community Center and go to graduate school to study the mental health aspects of public health, she resolved never again to work in the Jewish community.
“I knew that the Jewish community was not willing to talk about any of these issues” involving mental health, Kramer told an audience of 48 Milwaukee Jewish community professionals and lay leaders last week gathered at the Helen Bader Foundation.
Then in June 2000, two Jewish women suffering from different mental health problems – one middle aged, one young; one native born, one an immigrant from the former Soviet Union; one in Minneapolis, one in St. Paul – died during highly publicized encounters with police.
One, a victim of bi-polar illness, was shot to death when brandishing a knife during an episode. The other, a compulsive body-builder who had been taking a performance-enhancing drug, died apparently from a combination of abuse of that drug, which caused her to have a psychotic episode, and apparent mishandling by police officers.
These two events and the community’s responses to them made Kramer begin “to wonder whether the silence had been shattered,” she said. “From that summer, mental health education has taken on a life of its own, and taken over my life.”
So Kramer returned to Jewish community work and since 2001 has been director of the Twin Cities Jewish Community Mental Health Education Project.
The project brought together many Jewish organizations and institutions from both cities in an effort, as the project’s literature states, “to raise awareness of mental health issues in all segments of the Jewish community and to help ensure that this awareness leads to enhanced service delivery through congregations, schools, institutions and agencies.”
When people from Milwaukee’s Jewish community heard about this project, they were impressed, said Barbara Beckert, assistant director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations. “People felt it was a wonderful model for us to learn from.”
Not only is it “successful” and “very creative,” but also “it reached out and embraced the entire Jewish community,” Beckert said. This model “might be adapted to meet needs and concerns in our own community.”
So, MJCCR — whose Domestic Public Policy Task Force, has been working on mental health issues — collaborated with Jewish Family Services and the Bader Foundation to bring Kramer to Milwaukee and begin discussions about starting a similar project.
Participants in last week’s program, among who were people from area Jewish organizations and programs and several area synagogues, identified mental health concerns in the Milwaukee Jewish community, which included:
• What can the community do to reduce the stigma or embarrassment that isolate sufferers of mental illness and their families, and prevents them from seeking help?
• How can Jewish community professionals better know what Jewish resources exist to help such matters as substance abuse, sexuality issues, stress management and compulsive gambling?
• How can the community better deal with mental health issues of the elderly, which is a “growing problem”?
Kramer’s talk about the Twin Cities program is intended to “be the beginning of an ongoing dialogue and collaboration” within the Milwaukee Jewish community on mental health issues, said Margaret Charous, a board member of JFS who represents that organization on the board of the MJCCR.
And Tobey Libber, program officer for Jewish Life and Learning at the Bader Foundation, said that the foundation hopes “to serve as a resource” to fund projects in this area.
Paula Simon, executive director of the MJCCR, said that the next step should be to determine “what the appropriate [organizational] structure is” for the community to begin action.
Beckert in a telephone interview said “the leadership that put this together” — which also included Judy Strauss, vice president of program services at JFS — “will meet to look over the recommendations and feedback from the participants in the program and come up with suggestions for an action plan.” This will happen “within the next couple of weeks,” she added.
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