The Jewish Poor

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So who are the Jewish poor and how many are there?

Let’s focus on New York City, the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. According to the January 2004 Report on Jewish Poverty commissioned by the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty and the UJA-Federation of New York, approximately 311,700 Jewish households in the city are poor, which is defined as living on one-and-a-half times the income of someone at the poverty line.

That means that in 2004, the most recent year for which information is available, 20 percent of New York Jews were living at one-and-a-half times the $18,850 poverty line for a family of four. One-in-five Jews from the land of the Bergdorf-Goodman department store, the grand Park Avenue Synagogue, and H & H Bagels come from families making less than $21,678 per year. Another 85,000 are “near-poor,” who do not qualify but still cannot feed their families. There are 226,000 Jewish people in New York City poor enough to qualify for government assistance programs.

That means one in every five Jews in New York City is poor, which is a proportion that nearly equal to the percentage of all New Yorkers who are poor (20.4 percent).

Where are the Jewish poor of NYC located?

69 percent are located in Brooklyn (156,200 households), 19 percent are in Queens (42,700 households), six percent are in Manhattan (12,800), five percent are in the Bronx (10,400 households), and two percent are located in Staten Island (3,900 households).

The concentration of Jewish poverty in Brooklyn and Queens mirrors the areas where concentrations of Hasidic Jewish families and recent Russian and Soviet immigrants live. According to the report, poverty is more prevalent among seniors, people who are unemployed, people who are unable to work due to physical limitations, people without college degrees, Orthodox households with large families, and recent Russian-speaking immigrants. (...)

April 21, 2006 | Jacob Blumenfeld

http://www.newvoices.org/community?id=0030