During last week, Milwaukee’s Jewish Family Services received two unusual calls from “people in the Jewish community,” according to Michele Cohen, vice president of the agency’s Exceptional Needs division.
“JFS serves a great number of people with developmental disability and severe and persistent mental illness,” Cohen (no relation to this writer) told The Chronicle in a telephone interview.
But these calls were from people “who had not been clients asking for help to bail out their mortgages,” said Cohen. “These are normal middle class families
And these are just two of the people that have sought out JFS because of “an increase in their financial needs,” Cohen reported.
“We’re seeing an increase in the people calling who are months behind in their mortgage or rent and are asking for financial assistance,” Cohen said. Others call because “at the end of the month, clients don’t have as much money as they used to have.”
Some of these people have been referred to JFS by Rabbi Benzion Twerski of Congregation Beth Jehudah on Milwaukee’s west side.
For the past several years, Twerski told The Chronicle in a telephone interview, he has operated the CBJ Charity Fund. This raises and distributes money to members of his community for crisis expenses, such as therapy, food or clothing, he said. It gives $50,000 to $100,000 per year.
“What I’ve noticed happening over the last six months,” he reported, “is that I’m not getting the influx of funds I was getting in the past.”
“In addition, the fact that the job market is getting smaller is making it more difficult for people to make ends meet,” he continued. “To me, it doesn’t seem like [the situation] is getting better.”
Estimating that 7 to 10 percent of the community is struggling, Twerski said, “I just don’t have the liquid funds to help them, which I did at one time.”
Difficult to measure
To what extent this observed increase in local need is due to the difficulties that have afflicted the national economy since September — much of which had to do with events in the home loan industry — is difficult to measure.
Twerski said that even before that month he had been seeing or hearing about increasing problems in his community, including children going to Yeshiva Elementary School without lunches.
But Cohen said that people are calling with requests for large amounts of money, which JFS can’t provide. “Previously people might have called for a $25 gift card” to a grocery store, she said. “Now they are calling with greater needs.”
In addition, Dorene Paley has seen a quantifiable spike in requests for emergency food in the last couple of months.
Paley is director of community services at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and director of the Jewish Community Pantry, the only Jewish pantry in the Hunger Task Force network.
Paley told The Chronicle that in this past August, the pantry served 473 households or 1,349 individuals and in September, 491 households or 1,372 individuals; but in October, it served 529 households or 1,531 individuals, setting a record.
“We anticipate this [growth] is going to continue because our economic conditions are very problematic right now,” said Paley. “People who have not come to us before have to now.”
She said there are several reasons for this. Some senior citizens on fixed incomes are having difficulty as the value of their investments plunged during the last couple of months and prices of food, electricity and heat are rising. Some people are losing jobs and their homes.
A “small percentage” of the people coming to the pantry are Jews, but “we are getting calls from Jewish families,” Paley said.
The situation is even more difficult to measure in Madison, home of the state’s second largest Jewish community.
Barbara Spierer, associate director of Jewish Social Services there, said in a telephone interview that her information is “more anecdotal than statistical.”
Moreover, her agency, which serves Jews and non-Jews, generally sees or hears about people “who are on the margins anyway” and who “in any economy would not be OK.”
Nevertheless, Spierer said that, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the rate of price increase for food is “the highest in 18 years. As a consequence, there is real sticker shock.”
“We see people all year long who can’t make ends meet. It is just that much harder now,” she said.
Spierer also said waiting lists have become “just impossible” for such services as housing for homeless people. In general, there is “not enough money allocated to keep up with demand for services,” she said.
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