Jews are the hidden poor

The chicken for Rosh Hashanah dinner won't be kosher.

Kosher meat is expensive, and Doreen Shelow can't afford it.

"People think Jews aren't poor," said Shelow, 56, a disabled and divorced Jewish woman raising her grandson well below the poverty line in a tiny apartment in Somerton, in Northeast Philadelphia.

"It's an aspect of poverty that's overlooked. Even other Jews don't accept that there are poor Jews."

Often unseen and rarely discussed, Jewish poverty in the Philadelphia area hobbles lives in the same way it does among other ethnic and cultural groups. In fact, Jews may be among the poorest white people in the region.

According to an analysis by Allen Glicksman, director of research for the Philadelphia Corp. for Aging, 7 percent of Jewish people aged 18 to 39 were living at the poverty level ($19,790 for a family of three) in the five-county area in 2012. That's compared with 6 percent of white Protestants and Catholics.

Glicksman used figures from the Community Health Data Base, originally developed by the Public Health Management Corp., a Philadelphia nonprofit.

There are greater differences among people 75 and older, Glicksman's work shows. Twice as many Jews as white Protestants in the area lived in poverty: 6 percent vs. 3 percent. Among white Catholics, the number was 5 percent.

"It's just that there's just more poverty among Jews than the community recognizes," Glicksman said.

There are no government studies of Jewish poverty because the census is not permitted to ask questions about religion.

In New York, among its 1.1 million Jews, 25 percent of households are poor, according to the New York-based Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.

"People look at the Jewish community as being powerful, especially in finance and politics," said Raechel Hammer, vice president of the Klein Jewish Community Center in the Northeast. "But homelessness, poverty, food insecurity [insufficient money for food] - they all hurt Jewish people."

Rena Essrog, a social worker with the Samost Jewish Family and Children's Service of Southern New Jersey in Cherry Hill, agreed: "Stereotypes that all Jews are highly educated and wealthy feed the general public," she said, adding that Jews themselves "don't want to put out there that there are problems with hunger."

"It's not talked about," she said.

The agency has no statistics for South Jersey Jews in poverty. Still, three food pantries run by the agency have seen a 17 percent increase in food requests this year over last, said Marla Meyers, the executive director.

While being without a kosher chicken for the holidays is "troubling," Shelow acknowledges she has bigger problems.

Shelow, whose son is in the Navy, lost her job as a medical biller in 2012 when she got breast cancer, which was followed by four strokes.

Her husband of 25 years left her several years ago. Shelow is raising her daughter's son because, she said, her daughter's mental disabilities render her incapable of doing so.

Shelow receives $1,034 a month in Social Security disability payments and $34 in food stamps, a total of $12,816 a year, $3,000 below the federal poverty level for a family of two.

"I'm overwhelmed," she said.

Unlike Shelow, many of the Jewish poor in the Philadelphia area are elderly immigrants who came to the United States around 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed, said Brian Gralnick, a director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

Most who came to this area were in their 50s and 60s, and settled in Northeast Philadelphia, said Andre Krug, president and chief executive of the Klein JCC. While educated, they were often compelled to take low-paying jobs that did not offer pensions, Krug said.

"Among the Russian-speaking Jewish elderly here, 95 percent are at or below the poverty level," Krug said. "Ten percent are skipping meals, and 1,250 are homebound, many of them in rowhouses. We deliver them kosher meals.

"They can no longer climb the stairs, and live in their living rooms. You enter a house, and it's a complete mess."

Times are hard for poor Jewish seniors such as Lina Sapelnikova, 75, who emigrated to Bustleton from Ukraine in 1991 at age 52.

Divorced, Sapelnikova lost her 34-year-old son to lung disease in Ukraine, where she earned a degree in library science.

She said she left Ukraine because institutionalized anti-Semitism prevented her from working. Unable to speak English, she had difficulty finding a job in America, and now lives on federal benefits that total $10,080 annually, about $1,500 under the poverty level of $11,670 for a person living alone.

Sapelnikova also has health problems, depression among them.

"There's not enough food," she said through an interpreter. "I have many troubles."

It's not just the elderly who are suffering.

Mallory Hanfling, a social worker at Klein JCC who works with low-income Jews ages 18 to 60, said divorce, medical bills, and unemployment are plaguing her clients like so many others in postrecession America.

To cope, many young, poor Orthodox Jewish parents in the Northeast will barter services. In exchange for child care, for example, one woman cooks Sabbath dinners, Hanfling said. "It's humanity at its finest," she added.

Still, problems persist.

"There is a significant amount of food insecurity even on the Main Line," Hanfling said. "People would be shocked."

Compounding difficulties are what Hanfling described as a "huge push to maintain appearances" among Jewish peers.

In Haverford, Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, and elsewhere, some low-income Jews cannot maintain an expected lifestyle, and that is embarrassing, Hanfling said.

"I'm working with a family in a million-dollar house suddenly needing a food pantry," Hanfling said. The family's business venture failed, and now they are renting rooms in the house to pay the mortgage, she added: "They feel shame because they can't provide guitar lessons for the kids and have to get scholarships for a Jewish camp."

That's unfortunate, said Lynne Honickman, a Philadelphia philanthropist and founder and president of the Honickman Foundation, which promotes social change, the arts, education, and health.

But "ego may be getting in the way in that situation," added Honickman, who helped finance the Mitzvah Food Pantry created by Rabbi Andrea Merow 17 years ago at Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park. "Feeding children and elders, and getting needed medicine, are the most important things. Not camp."

Honickman, who works to help the homeless, and has quietly distributed gift certificates so poor Jewish children could get toys for Hanukkah, said the "poverty and devastation in the Jewish population" in Philadelphia and its suburbs had been "kept undercover."

"The Jewish population themselves don't believe it exists," she said. "There's denial. It's horrifying."

Merow said that's why "it behooves all of us in the Jewish community to reach out to those families really affected by the economic downturn."

That is happening to Doreen Shelow, whose bad luck has been leavened with some good. Anonymous donors, with Merow's guidance, are paying the tuition - at least for this year - for Shelow's grandson to attend Perelman Jewish Day School in Cheltenham.

"Having help like that gives me a sense of calm," Shelow said. "And my grandson will be able to be raised Jewish. That's so important to me."

Note: This article was corrected. Doreen Shelow's name was misspelled in several instances.

215-854-4969

@AlfredLubrano