|
|
December 24, 2004/Tevet 12 5765, Vol. 57, No. 17
Cutbacks hit hard at impoverished Israelis
DINA KRAFT
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Gabriella Friedlander recently stopped paying her mortgage.
"It was either paying the mortgage or having electricity, water and gas," said the 38-year-old single mother, her hands clasped tightly together on a small crochet-covered table in her dimly lit apartment.
Friedlander, who works part time as a care-giving assistant for the elderly, is among the swelling ranks of Israel's working poor. She works five hours a day, six days a week, for a monthly salary of $451.
Government assistance brings her income each month up to about $700, but she still struggles to make ends meet.
Massive government cutbacks in social spending over the past year have hit the working poor especially hard. Friedlander now receives about $225 less in aid than she did before the cutbacks.
Her reduced income means she can no longer afford physical therapy for her 11-year-old son, who suffers from a rare connective tissue disorder. It also means that making the $383 monthly mortgage payment on her apartment, located in an impoverished Ashdod neighborhood, is out of the question.
Meanwhile, Friedlander, who immigrated to Israel from Argentina in 1997, is sinking into debt.
According to Israeli government standards, Friedlander is floating just above the poverty line of $640 a month for a household of two individuals.
The number of poor in Israel rose by 7.4 percent in 2003 to 1.42 million people, according to the National Insurance Institute's 2003 poverty report.
That means that 22 percent of the population - more than one in five Israelis - is living below the poverty line. In 2002, 20 percent of the population lived in poverty.
The gap between rich and poor in Israel rises every year and is among the highest in the Western world. Children are especially hard hit: Of the 1.42 million Israelis living under the poverty line, 653,000 were children.
Unemployment in Israel reached 10.7 percent in 2003.
A financial crisis brought on by the intifada and a general economic downturn has forced Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to engineer national austerity budgets.
But experts say his economic reform policies, which have included dramatic cuts in public spending on items such as welfare payments, have been especially tough on the poor.
Not only children have felt the impact: Single-parent families, large families, Israeli Arabs and immigrants also have been hit. They are among the groups that in the past have benefited from child subsidies that now have been greatly reduced.
Israel's economy is showing signs of recovery, but full-time jobs paying above the minimum wage can be hard to find for the country's poorest segments.
Furthermore, much of the economic growth is taking place at the top - in the high-tech sector and among those who invest in the stock market.
The number of single-parent Israeli households beneath the poverty line increased by 11 percent in 2003. Of the 60 percent of single parents who work, 30 percent do so only part-time, according to statistics compiled by the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute in Jerusalem.
Responding to the poverty report, Netanyahu said the answer was to get people back to work.
"That's the way to treat poverty - to get people to go to work," he said.
Jack Habib, director of the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, said one problem is that the government's economic reforms have not been coupled with employment assistance.
"Clearly there needs to be a major national effort for employment," Habib said. "There needs to be focused effort to make that happen."
The government is exploring new ways to stop the growth in the poverty rolls. Among new initiatives is an experimental welfare-to-work program.
Responding to the report, Adam Schwartz, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix, said his agency's funds for Israel are distributed through the national organization, the United Jewish Communities. UJC is "taking a very close look and working with the government of Israel on the issue of growing poverty in Israel," he said.
One issue beyond the government's responsibility, he added, "is what the diaspora Jewish community can and should be doing to help."
Schwartz said, "We do anticipate that there will be growing opportunities and need for us to provide some financial support for programs and services that directly respond to the needs of the poor in Israel."
Contributing Editor Hank Neyer contributed to this article.
|
|
