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When Work Is Not Enough

Religion and Welfare Shape Economics for the Hasidim

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April 21, 1997, Section B, Page 1Buy Reprints
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The job interviews take place with practical, unspoken calculation in Southside's dozens of Hasidic schools. The schoolteacher is desperate for work; the school administrator, short of funds, can offer only the most minimal of wages.

But the offers, at perhaps $150 a week for 30 hours of teaching, are made and almost always accepted for one central reason: welfare. The teacher knows welfare payments will supplement a meager income; the school knows employees who also receive welfare will be able to survive on low salaries.

''It's a mutual understanding, I suppose,'' said the director of a Bedford Avenue yeshiva in the Southside section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. ''I know the price they will go for, and that's what I pay.''

Rabbi Leib Glanz, whose United Talmudic Academy employs about 700 teachers in Southside, said: ''If they can't take what I can pay, I get someone else. I do not count on welfare when I hire. But clearly welfare has been beneficial to the yeshivas.''

From household incomes to school budgets, public assistance has penetrated the world of Southside's Hasidim. The Hasidim's ability to make the welfare system work for them has provoked both admiration and suspicion among welfare agency officials and many people who live alongside the Hasidim in Southside. The deep roots of welfare show how benefits subsidize industry, but they also call attention to an unsettling question that lies behind the debate about welfare reform: what if work is not enough?

Where the worlds of welfare and work overlap, welfare reform promises a future without government benefits. Those benefits have been the foundation of a low-wage economy. For other welfare- dependent populations, the policy prescription has been work; for a group where work is already a given, the answers do not come as quickly.

At least one-third of the estimated 7,000 Hasidic families in Williamsburg receive public assistance, according to neighborhood leaders.

The benefits, including welfare payments, food stamps and subsidized housing, sustain the families with as many as 10 or 12 children; they fill the cash registers of the kosher supermarkets on Lee Avenue and help underwrite much of the work done by the Hasidim, whether in schools, retail stores or factories.

The People

Religion Shapes Lives and Families

The Hasidim, carrying on the traditions of a Jewish movement founded in the 18th century, live in an insular, highly ordered world of prayer and study, their customs governing everything from their clothing to the lines of separation between men and women, boys and girls. They gather for prayer twice a day and strictly honor the Sabbath, requirements that often restrict what jobs they can take, what hours they can work.

They have their own newspapers as well as their own judicial system for resolving internal disputes. While they live largely apart from the secular world, they nonetheless have an appetite for politics.

And they have large families: the average household has eight children, neighborhood leaders say. Hasidic parents commonly say that large families are the most satisfying realization of their religion, which tells them to be fruitful and multiply.

But their religious emphasis has created economic dead ends for many of the Hasidim of Southside. The focus on religious studies results in children ending secular education at age 13, curtailing job skills. Other factors also limit opportunity: discrimination in the mainstream workplace exists; the neighborhood's once-dominant industries, like the jewelry and garment trades, have dwindled; some have difficulty with English, their second language, and the neighborhood's substantial network of private charity, built around wealthy households and loan societies in every synagogue, is already overtaxed.

A 27-year-old Hasidic welfare recipient gave voice to confusion, fear and facts of cultural life that left him without great economic options. He and others interviewed did not want their full identities revealed, citing their privacy and a sense of embarrassment.

''I hope to get off, I am trying to get off,'' he said. A teacher who has four children, he conceded that he started his family knowing his restricted economic situation. ''But we don't first have a business and then children. We do what we feel is right, and then try and do our best.''

The System

Relying on Help Is Ingrained

One foundation of the Hasidim's economy is an organized, aggressive approach to winning welfare benefits. For example, the office of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, the Hasidim's main social services center in Southside, has a staff that fills out applications for aid and telephones city officials to contest adverse decisions. Advocates for Southside's Latino poor cite with envy the Hasidim's unified efforts at obtaining public assistance. Current and former city welfare officials regard the Hasidim's pattern of obtaining public assistance -- the widespread listing of nearly identical incomes that fall just within qualifying guidelines -- as circumstantial evidence of manipulation, or even fraud.

One Federal program intended to help make low-income work a more attractive alternative than welfare is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which pays up to $3,500 to a family with an income of $10,000. But among the Hasidim, it does not seem to be as well known as the state welfare program that aids low-income families and childless adults, Home Relief. The size of the credit adds only modestly to a large family's economic picture. Government officials said that they could not estimate how many of the Hasidim are taking advantage of the credit.

Welfare for the Hasidim, then, is both a lifesaver and a machine to be put to optimal use, something that keeps families safe and businesses running. Dependency is no less ingrained than in the city's more stereotypical welfare recipient -- the African-American or Latino single mother.

But the Hasidim's world of welfare is just as endangered. The new Federal welfare law limits cash benefits for any family to five years. New York State lawmakers are debating Gov. George E. Pataki's proposal to cut cash benefits. And Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is requiring beneficiaries to work cleaning streets or offices in order to continue receiving benefits.

The new Federal law also means that immigrants who are not citizens and children suffering from behavioral and learning disabilities, groups that are both represented among the Hasidim of Southside, are losing Federal Supplemental Security Income.

''The myth is that there are no poor Jews,'' said Rabbi Chaim Stauber, who runs a mental health clinic in Southside. ''But Jews, like others, have plenty of people who meet all the criteria for welfare. The politicians only see the red and black ink of budget ledgers. They don't see human faces.''

The Worries

Not Lack of Work, Lack of Income

The face of welfare in the Hasidim is typically the face of a working father, one who reports his income and is a partner in an intact family.

One 39-year-old kindergarten teacher, the father of four children, ages 5 through 12, earns $131.60 a week working part time. His welfare benefits include $217 each month from the state's Home Relief program, $420 a month in food stamps, and medical coverage.

Work -- the return to it or the initial embrace of it -- is the solution underlying both the philosophy and strategy of welfare reform. But work, for many Hasidic recipients, is not the central problem; income is.

Already the kindergarten teacher's household has tasted the changing welfare realities. Although the Hasidim do not bar women from working, the teacher's wife, like many worried about caring for their children, refused the city's mandatory work requirement and the family's Home Relief grant was reduced from $259 to $217.

As the world of welfare changes, and limits on benefits start to reduce family incomes, concerns are growing among the Hasidim.

''It is frightening to think of the chain reaction in our neighborhood,'' said Rabbi Yitzchok Schwartz, who oversees a handful of yeshivas. ''A lot will have to be reorganized. Maybe they will give welfare another name -- close one door, open another.''

Others worry more darkly. ''If we are asked to start increasing salaries,'' Rabbi Glanz said of the neighborhood's schools, ''we will not survive.''

The Future

Changing the Kinds Of Jobs Available

The answer, according to government officials, is straightforward: find higher-paying work. ''In many ways, this sort of population has a leg up,'' Brian Wing, the acting commissioner of the State Department of Social Services, said of the Hasidim. ''The state is not going to walk away from employment training. Skills development will be the target.''

But William Fish, who runs an employment office on Clymer Street in Southside, said that will be difficult. ''They have 6, 10 children, no computer skills,'' he said of the applicants he encounters daily. ''They don't want welfare to be a life style. But it is real. I don't know what the solution is.''

While acknowledging that real poverty and need exist among the Hasidim, others are less wholly sympathetic. Neighborhood veterans of the fight for public housing in Southside, for instance, say their experiences have convinced them that some Hasidim abuse public assistance.

''It is not unnatural for people to get what they can for themselves,'' said Martin Needleman, executive director of Brooklyn Legal Services of Williamsburg, a nonprofit organization that sued the New York City Housing Authority saying that the city gives preferential treatment to the Hasidim. ''But the Hasidim in Williamsburg have a unique, sophisticated and highly efficient capacity to generate documents that support eligibility for public assistance that do not always reflect reality.''

City welfare officials publicly deny that fraud among the Hasidim is tolerated. But in interviews, a half-dozen current and former agency officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Hasidic manipulation of the system is a problem. Even sympathetic experts on Jewish poverty acknowledge the Hasidim ''work the system.''

Rabbi David Niederman, the executive director of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, said he did not believe significant welfare cheating went on. ''You do not have to lie to be eligible for benefits,'' he said. ''Is there somebody who might cheat? Yes. People cheat on their taxes, too.''

A sophisticated, organized approach could help the Hasidim succeed where many other groups have failed -- moving people from welfare to self-sufficient working lives. Although such efforts have a poor track record, the Hasidim start with other factors in their favor: intact families and a basic, if narrowly defined, devotion to education.

Already, Hasidic leaders are responding to welfare reform by taking initial steps to expand secular education and high-tech job training, and their long-time attempts at economic development now are infused with a sense of crisis.

''The enemy is unemployment or inadequate employment and not welfare,'' said Rabbi Joseph Weber, a leader of one Hasidic congregation, the Pupa sect. ''The only option is to face the enemy and act accordingly.''

Rabbi Weber, who runs the Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov, has integrated more vocational training into the school's curriculum, and is raising money for night classes in computer technology. And Rabbi Niederman has a plan for creating a ''back office'' operation in Southside, where residents would do accounting and data entry work for financial firms and government agencies.

''The unconventional no longer will be out of the question,'' Rabbi Niederman said.

Welfare Neighborhood

The toughening of the rules governing Supplemental Security Income is expected to be felt strongly in many poor neighborhoods. This is the fourth in a series of articles describing how an array of changes in welfare policy is coming together in one Brooklyn neighborhood, Southside in the Williamsburg section.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: Religion and Welfare Shape Economics for the Hasidim. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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