In the mid-80s, I wrote an article about four homeless Jewish men living here on the streets of Baltimore.
One of them was sleeping behind MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Arts. His name was Phil, and he was a member of my Cub Scout den when we were both young boys. He was fighting a difficult fight with mental illness.
There was a second man, whose name was also Phil. He was a Viet Nam War veteran, also with mental illness issues, and he would walk from the a homeless shelter near Harbor Place to Temple Oheb Shalom on Park Heights Avenue on Friday nights just get something to eat and to be around Jews.
By his account, no one ever asked him his name, nor did they offer him a ride back to the shelter, or a way out of the shelter. Think about that walk for a second. We’re talking walking from Harbor Place to the almost the corner of Park Heights and Slade. Could you walk that walk?
At least one other was sleeping on a steam grate on Baltimore Street or as it is better known, the Block. In a pile of blankets and old coats and paper bags, he told me about his bar mitzvah, and a little bit of his life growing up in Jewish Baltimore. Glittery yellow and red lights flashed in the background from the seedy and sad strip joints.
The fourth guy was just plain living in his car.
Each one of these guys had a mental illness of some sort. Each one of them were familiar names to what was then called Jewish Family Services. While their cases were private, I got the impression that their mental illnesses stood as obstacles even when it came down to receiving help from JFS.
I understood that there was a sincere effort by the Jewish community to reach out to these men. And that effort remains stronger than ever.
But then I ran into a comment that I still carry with me. It’s the comment that motivates me to write articles like the one written in last week’s issue about, “Homeless in Pikesville.”
It was the mid-1980s, it was Friday the story appeared in the JT on the homeless Jews, and I was meeting with a couple of community leaders, one extremely wealthy man who was wearing a dark tailored suit and wrote with a fountain pen that probably would have been my week’s salary back then.
I don’t remember to this day what the meeting was about. I just remember him saying to me, “we take care of 100,000 Jews here in Baltimore. You find the four we couldn’t help, and you put them on the cover.”
The man who said this probably donated millions to the Associated and other causes. His name probably has dedicated building wings and classrooms and done so much good. Yet, it was that one statement showing me his disconnect from reality.
If this man’s own child were homeless, I guarantee you he’d be out there looking for him, trying to find a way to bring him back to safety and productivity.
For homeless people, it’s not just about the food and the shelter and the clothing. That’s difficult enough to bear. But it’s also about getting beaten up. It’s about washing your hands and face and hair in a gas station bathroom, if you’re lucky. It’s about getting mugged, robbed and you have nothing to give the robbers. If you are a woman, it’s about rape. It’s about standing in line at a soup kitchen, not getting there in time, and getting cut off for lunch.
It’s about people who pass you by and don’t want to talk to you, touch you or wish you would just disappear.
It’s about children who are also homeless, who get their best meal in a school cafeteria.
Look, in this economic climate, there is so many individualized levels to homelessness.
We’ve got an excellent system in place to help one another in the Jewish community.
That doesn’t mean, however, that someone, can’t slip through the cracks of the safety net.
The answer can’t be, out of all the Jews we save, we managed to find the one who slipped through.
That is not the message of a caring community.
It’s only a clue that we have to work harder on our selves as Jews, and we have more work to do to help others in need.
What are we on this earth for if not to help one another?
Who cares what is in place if one Jew is homeless, we’re all responsible.
We need to find him and take care of him and his family.
If there are more, then it is our God-given mandate to find them and help them heal as well.
 

Thanks to you, Phil, and to the JT in general, for your willingness to explore issues that we as a community would rather avoid and for so eloquently giving a voice to those who would otherwise suffer in silence.  May G-d grant you continued strength and success.

But the wealthy man was right that your paper was bullying the community by displaying the few homeless people that aren’t being helped. Some day you’ll realize that by highlighting the exceptions to the rule you create enemies and that does not help the community one bit. I imagine you had the decency to mention the positive efforts of the community at the time, but impressions are made by what you highlight and you corrupted a positive message with false impressions. Unfortunately your paper continues to do the same to this day. It’s dividing our community and I sure hope that is not your goal.