Over 20 years ago, on a cold Christmas eve, I covered an incredible volunteer effort in some pretty bleak areas of Baltimore.
A Jewish woman named Linda Greenberg was spending a great deal of her own money, renting trucks and distributing gifts such as gloves, hats, scarves and socks to the homeless.
We traveled to spaces next to railroad tracks, highways, back alleys and shelters. We saw the neighborhoods of the forgotten.
It was the human condition in terrible, terrible need.
Helping lead the effort was a young lady who had been homeless, but worked her way out of it.
This was in the mid-1980s. I asked the lady if she knew of any Jews living on the streets.
She said she knew of at least four homeless Jewish men.
The very next week, we met again. This time I drove her in my car, and we found the four men.
One was a childhood friend of mine who was sleeping outside in the dead of winter behind what was the old B&O Railroad Station.
Another man was a Vietnam vet who would walk from a inner harbor shelter to Temple Oheb Shalom on Friday evenings, to stay connected Jewishly and to have something to eat.
At least one other lived in a car.
And the fourth was one of those heaps of humanity we see sleeping on a sidewalk heating grate.
The article would appear in the Jewish Times.
The very Friday it published, I was in the office of a community leader when one of his lay leaders, a local philanthropist could no better than say to me, “We have close to 100,000 Jews, you found the four who slipped through the safety net.”
It’s that attitude, while I know extreme, that is keeping Jews from seeking and getting help they need during these awful times of record unemployment.
Some people are afraid to ask. Or they live with the feeling they have done something wrong or they aren’t living up to some high bar of Jewish expectations.
Why?
Because of the 100,000 Jews in Baltimore, there is an attitude among some of “what’s the big deal? So what if there are 1,000 unemployed Jews? That’s only a small percent after all. And these unemployed. They live out there somewhere.
Jewish Community Services is the anecdote for that attitude, and I know that feeding, housing, caring for and keeping Jews alive, well and productive IS its priority. So this isn’t about an agency or a person. The Associated and other local agencies are about solutions and compassion.
I’m not concerned there.
We need to understand, those of us who aren’t unemployed or who aren’t service providers, that when we look into the eyes of an unemployed person, we are looking directly at ourselves.
Unemployment in the Jewish community cannot be looked on as a stigma. A temporary setback, perhaps. But nothing more. And it has to be that the unemployed flow through the Jewish “system” just as equally as everyone else.
And that is also the system of human nature.
We have to ask our co-community members without them feeling stigmatized, “what can I do?”
Sometimes, it’s just about listening again and again and again.
Other times it’s networking.
And still other times, it might come down to financial help.
But we have to create the environment where those conversations can happen without shame. Because the more we talk openly about unemployment, the more we take whatever stigma there is off of it.
It’s not about 1,000 people. It’s about individuals we love. It’s really about us.
Can we start by at least listening?
We can.

Phil, I wanted to thank you for writing this article, yet there’s something that you are missing.  I recently attempted to get help from the Associated and found it to be nearly impossible to deal with.  Up until recently I had alway donated money to just about any Jewish organization that asked for help.  This year has been completely different.  I have been out of work for months due to illness.  It got to the point that I ran out of food and my electricity was about to be turned off.  I finally had no choice but to do the unimaginable.  I went to Jewish Family Services for emergency financial assistance. 

The questions this agency asked me and the proof they demanded, made me feel as if I was a criminal.  I was humiliated to the point in which I considered suicide.  If it wasn’t for the kindness of a neighbor, who suggested I go to his local church group for help, I would not be here today.  His church group offered the support I needed in a respectful and dignified manor. 

Looking back, the way in which Jewish Family Services left me feeling, it made me feel ashamed that I was a Jew.