May 29, 2009/Sivan 6 5769, Volume 61, No. 37 PROFILE Close window Print this page JDC: Aiding world's needy Jews SALVATORE CAPUTO Senior Staff Writer   "The critical issue is that as bad as things are here, we are a global people, and we're all responsible one for the other, and if we don't take care of our brethren overseas, we won't be a global people anymore." So says Steve Schwager, the CEO and executive director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (better known as the JDC or "the Joint"). He was in Phoenix recently to press the case that, as tempting as it is to turn the focus inward in these trying times, the American Jewish community should not lose sight of the growing needs of Jews around the world. JDC is an overseas partner of United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of the Jewish federation system in North America, which includes Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix. Schwager, who joined JDC in 1989 as chief operating officer, took on his current role in 2002. The Joint aids poor and struggling Jewish communities in 70 countries around the world. "You can't manage in 70 countries sitting in New York," he says, so he and his staff are generally on the road about 130 days a year. Q: You just came back from Ukraine; what was the situation there? A: First of all, Ukraine was a thriving economy until about a year ago: People were making money; there were businesses; all the national chain stores were open; real estate was booming. All of that stopped. It's like 17 or 18 years of progress have been wiped out and we're back to the period of time right after communism ended. So you have all these huge buildings with construction cranes on the roof - no work. Government officials have taken 50 percent pay cuts. I'd like to see that happen here. Pensions are now running a week to two weeks late. Think about Social Security recipients here if they got their pensions two weeks late. Very high unemployment and even the high unemployment statistics don't tell the whole story because (there are) many people furloughed three and four days a week, the factories are stopped, the stores are closed. It's like right on the edge of where it was in '92, when everybody was out on the street selling their last piece of clothing, their last shoes, their last books, anything to get money. The only constant in the equation is us. We have a network of welfare services and Jewish family services that the Joint created over the last 19 years and the only constant in funding is the Joint. Q: I'm assuming that some of those conditions on the ground in Ukraine are probably worse in the rest of the former Soviet Union. A: Oh, it's everywhere. It's Uzbekistan, it's all the 'stans' where the Asian republics are, it's Russia, it's everywhere. Everywhere you go, you can see that the economic system is grinding to a halt and people are out of work and people can't afford medicine and people can't afford basic needs. It's just going back to the way it was at the end of communism, and it would not surprise me that the democracies that have flourished in the last number of years will go, in that there will be some dictator who comes into power and takes control. It won't be communism, but it'll be a dictator. By the way, (the economic crisis is) everywhere in the world, but the former Soviet Union always had very poor Jews, and it's the worst. We describe it - and it's not my description it's a federal judge in New York - that 'the Jews of the former Soviet Union are the poorest Jews on Earth.' It's terrible, and then we have similar situations in Latin America. Argentina, which was a basket case, which the American Jewish community bailed out, which was coming back, is now beginning to see demonstrations in the streets, dissatisfaction with Mrs. (Cristina Fernandez de) Kirchner, (president of Argentina,) corruption, crime, businesses going out, and that seems to be spreading. That's the southern end of Latin America, and then you have (President Hugo) Chavez (of Venezuela) in the north, who's also spreading anti-Jewish, anti-Zionistic activities, so it's all over at the moment. Q: In Venezuela, is it the economy or purely the political leadership that's an issue for you? A: A little bit of both. The Venezuelan economy was built on oil, exporting oil, and it was built on exporting oil at a minimum of $60 a barrel, and the prices are now below $60 a barrel, so it means Chavez doesn't have enough money. And the Jews tend to be the middle and upper class, not that there's a lot of them, 12,000 now, but they tend to be the upper and middle class, and they become easy targets for reappropriation for the poor. There are now regular flights from Tehran to Caracas and on those flights are Muslim clerics who are being sent to the countryside to convert the Indians from Catholicism to Islam. That's the southern border of the United States. It's a serious, serious situation. Q: In Argentina, on the other hand, the problems stem mostly from the economy? A: Argentina's got the largest Jewish population in South America. There are more than 200,000 Jews, and most of them are in Buenos Aires. So it's a significant population with a full infrastructure of Jewish activities. There are more than 400 organizations in Buenos Aires - shuls, welfare centers, the largest JCCs in the world are in Buenos Aires, JCCs with 12,000 and 13,000 members, huge, huge facilities. Q: I was surprised to learn JDC works in Israel as well. What do you do there? A: The statistics from the Israeli national Bureau of Statistics say one-third of all children in Israel live below the poverty line, and since children don't live by themselves, it means that families, one-third of the families in Israel live below the poverty line. The disparity between rich and poor in Israel is greater than anyplace else in the world, even greater than America. In Israel, we have what I describe as a unique partnership with the government of Israel. In the rest of the world, we fund and partner with local Jewish communities to provide services. In Israel, we partner with the government to develop services, and what that means is that when the government has a need in the social services, they come to us; we develop a series of pilot programs; in the first years, we pay 80 percent and the government pays 20 percent; and over five years, the government takes on 100 percent funding; and then the program is evaluated, and if it's successful, then the government replicates the program at its expense. Q: Like a business incubator? A: Exactly right, and so that's the concept. What are the kinds of things we do? Everywhere in Israel you go, you'll find a community center. We brought the community center concept to Israel. Today there are hundreds of them, we don't fund any of it. Similarly, if you look at day-care centers for the elderly, we built the first five or six. Today, there are 175 of them. If you look at services for children at risk, these kids we're talking about, we built the network of services for children at risk, everything from family respite centers to out of home residences for abused kids, and today the government funds it, and we're doing other things. The list goes on and on. Those are the kinds of things we do in Israel. The question for us now is the Joint itself has been around since 1914. It's had three goals: rescue, relief and renewal. I don't actually like the term "renewal," because I don't know what it means, so I call it "ensuring the Jewish future," and a lot of what we do is work with small Jewish communities who are threatened to make sure that people can live a Jewish life, and so if you were to ask me where the three most endangered Jewish communities are, one is the Jewish community in Iran, and while the Joint doesn't work there, we are concerned about the 25,000 Jews who live in Iran, and it's an interesting issue because most people think the 25,000 Jews are prisoners. They're actually free to leave. They could leave tomorrow if they want. There are 20 functioning synagogues, there are 4,000 kids that go to Jewish day school and there's a whole Jewish life and the people don't leave. They're virtually all in Tehran. There's some in smaller cities, but they're virtually all in Tehran. The second community I worry about is the Jewish community in Venezuela, 12,000 Jews, down from 17,000 about five years ago, a very tight-knit, well-organized community, everybody knows everybody, and they're now being the victim of what I describe as state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Their shuls have been desecrated. They arrested 12 policemen who supposedly were behind it, but you can be sure they weren't behind it. There were signs on government buildings - Mogen Davids with swastikas painted in the middle - and that community also, if need be, will be rescued by the Joint, but I'm hoping that somehow calmer heads will prevail. And here again, those people could leave if they chose to leave. They just haven't gone. And the last community is the Jewish community in Zimbabwe, 300 Jews. Half live in Harare, and half live in a city called Bulawayo. Zimbabwe is 12 million black, 20,000 white, 300 Jews, mostly South Africans and Lithuanians who came when it was Rhodesia and had businesses. At the peak, the community was 10,000, so now it's 300. The official economy is gone. Everything is done in the black market on the streets. Things are very hard to come by. Basic food is unavailable. We are partnering with the South African Jewish community, who has a traveling rabbi who brings in food and medicine once a month because it's unavailable, unavailable. There's nothing in the stores. The stores are completely empty. The official economy is just gone. And in Harare, there's a Jewish school, 300 students. I just said to you there are 150 Jews there, so there's 300 students: three Jews, 297 black and Afrikaner. The school has a full Jewish curriculum. They teach Hebrew. The boys wear kippot, and when I was there we planted trees for Tu'b Shevat. So I met the parents of the three Jewish kids and I said, "Why is this a Jewish school' They said, 'We agree with you. It shouldn't be a Jewish school anymore because it's mostly black and Afrikaner kids. We held a meeting of the parents association and we said to them we want to change the curriculum of the school to a general academic curriculum,' and they took a vote, 297 to three not to change. (The feedback was:) "Jews have high standards. If you change the curriculum, the standard of the school will go down." So we have 297 kids each year in Zimbabwe learning Hebrew, celebrating the Jewish holidays and wearing kippot, and those kids are (mostly) black. Q: One of the things we've heard over the past couple of years is that the money doesn't stretch as far as it used to because of the weakness of the dollar, but what about now? A: Last year was a much more serious problem for us. Last year, the dollar got weak, which meant that it bought less foreign currency overseas, and around the world we scaled back our programs. We probably lost in terms of buying power probably $30 million or $40 million, just because of the exchange rate. The simplest example is if you took a person who was earning 300,000 shekels a year in Israel in 2007, that would cost us $70,000. In 2008, the same person, earning the same salary cost us $90,000, just because of the exchange rate change, and this year that person cost us about $75,000 because the exchange rate has gone the other way. Last year, we did a large layoff around the world. We laid off about 8 percent of our workforce, and we laid off people with five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years of experience, we just couldn't afford it, we couldn't operate. This year, the dollar's stronger so that's helped a little bit in this crisis of meeting needs. We have the same dollars, which buy more local currency this year than last year. Q: But then the need is worse this year? A: Yep, but I'd rather have it this way than have the value of the dollar go down and have the need go up ... We'll probably have further budget reductions this year because federation campaigns are down and there's very heavy competition for local needs and overseas needs, and one of the reasons I'm here is to press the case, for as poor as people are here, things are much worse in the places we operate in. Q: What is the typical split of federation contributions to local needs and overseas needs? A: Up until 1990, the average across the country was 50-50, 50 percent local, 50 percent overseas. In 1990 ... there was the first Jewish population study and it talked about (how) the Jewish community was going to disappear in America. There was intermarriage, there was assimilation, there was all those terrible things, and federations needed to respond to that report and they needed money to respond, and rather than go raise more money, they chipped away at the overseas funding, so that by the year 2000, it was 60-40, and today it's 70-30, so 70 percent of the money raised by federations stays locally and 30 percent goes overseas. Within the average, there's all extremes. You can go to Chicago, which is still 50-50, and you can go to South Florida, which is 100 percent local, one or two communities in South Florida, so it's all across the lot, but the national average is now 70-30. And the system is an amazing system, despite how it gets split. It raises $900 million a year. It's amazing. And the federation system is struggling. It's trying to figure out how to deal with the economic downturn, how to meet all the needs that are out there. Q: Do you have overseas partners that you leverage this money with? A: Everywhere. First of all, in every community we work in, we try and have the local community put up some share of the money. It's never 100 percent (from the JDC), and the ratios vary all across the lot, but if you simply give somebody money or give them programs, they don't have any ownership of it, it's never theirs, and the Joint as an organization has a goal - we're different than everybody else - we would like to go out of business. We would like every Jewish community to meet its own needs and we would go out of business. And candidly, in our history we've worked in 85 countries, today we're in 70, so there are communities that have become freestanding and independent and have said, "Goodbye, Joint." We now have partnerships where we get serious funding from the Canadian community, the British community, the French community, Italian community, the Dutch community. We're trying to break into Australia now. Even I learned something new. I was in Australia last year. The Australian Jewish community is about 100,000. It turns out the Joint brought 50 percent of the community to Australia. It brought them in three waves. It brought them after World War II, people out of the displaced persons camps. It brought them after the Hungarian Revolution in 1959, and it brought them when (Fidel) Castro came to power, from Cuba. I had no idea, and the people there had no idea we were still in business. People thought we'd gone out of business. It's really interesting. We have a great photo archive in New York, probably the best collection of pictures of the last century of Jewish life, and we did a photo exhibition in Sydney of pictures from our collection of Australian Jewry, and people came to look at the pictures - these pictures from the '40s and the '50s, and the '60s - and said, "That's me. That's my mother. That's my father." And then people poured out their whole story of how they got there. Visit jdc.org.