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16 Friday, June 29,1984 „..., ,T,FIEDETROkiiiWiiiiii6Mgwv:7mrluvolliiiguatisameg3,3crtrumol“ft ml7qatulvilmliivr;r1vri,l,

CITY LIMITS

Continued from preceding page

in the building earlier this spring,
the ceremony had to be shifted. The
Ark, chandeliers and a number of
pews were damaged by smoke and
water during the fire. The synagogue
is insured and repairs are underway.
Many of the synagogue's fur-
nishings come from the Farnsworth
St. synagogue, which later became
the Mt. Olive Baptist Church on
Farnsworth near St. Antoine.
Cong. T'chiyah can claim at least
partial credit for getting one subur-
ban family to move back to the city.
Dr. Ronald Poland, who, with his
wife and two children, moved to the
Elmwood Park area (just east of
Lafayette Park) in 1977 after selling
the family's Oak Park home, never
even knew downtown residential
housing existed until he attended the
Freedom Festival one summer about
ten years ago. Originally from
Philadelphia, Dr. Poland found the
cultural advantages of life in the
large city appealing. He and his wife
work downtown.
The Polands say they became
more Jewishly active following the
move than they had been while resi-
dents of a heavily Jewish suburb.
"We had been totally non-
participating, non-active Jews when
we lived in Oak Park. When we
moved downtown, we became in-
volved with the much smaller Jewish
community here." Dr. Poland feels

the chance to get in on the ground
floor Of something like Cong.
T'chiyah may have contributed to
their reawakening.
Most Jews choosing to live inside
Detroit proper agree that the advan-
tages and disadvantages, though
measurable, were not really the de-
termining factors when it came time
to decide where they wanted their
homes. City life, for them, is a feel-
ing, a series of nuances and an at-
mosphere. "You have to experience it
to know what it's like," Ms. Harris
said.

T

•

he dayroom at the Ambas-
sador Convalescent Center
has probably seen better
days. The furniture, though rela-
tively modern, is scarred by worn,
torn upholstery. The large picture
windows have no curtains or shades,
forcing the air conditioning system to
work twice as hard to produce half
the cool air needed. A film, similar to
the kind found on the car windows of
a heavy smoker, covers each of the
half-dozen tables scattered through-
out the room.
Martha Sanfield, one of the three
Jewish residents at the nursing
home, sits back in a tattered chair in
the corner of the dayroom, trying to
block out the problems of being old
and alone in a city like Detroit. Does
the shabby condition of the Ambas-
sador bother her?. Not really, said
Mrs. Sanfield. "It's a place, just like
any other place."
Unfortunately, the Ambassador,

on Woodward and Leicester in the
heart of the inner city, is not "just
like any other place." The 195-bed
facility has a history of health viola-
tions and other problems dating back
to 1979. Last year, following a
lengthy hearing, the State Depart-
ment of Public Health fined the home
$600 for the 1981 scalding death of
Charles Knopp. Knopp had been
bathed by two orderlies in tap water
that was later tested and found to be
138 degrees — 28 degrees higher
than the limit allowed by the state.
Passive acceptance of such con-
ditions by nursing home residents is
fairly typical, according to Faye
Menczer, who heads the Project Out-
reach program for Jewish Vocational
Services (JVS). "Many of these
people are products of the institu-
tional system. They have already de-
veloped a confined personality. They
have been cnditioned to their situa-
tion and are often willing to accept
substandard conditions."
The Project Outreach program,
which caters to the needs of more
than 200 Jews living within the De-

Who live in nursing honies and foster
care homes already have someone
who is physically and legally respon-
sible for them. The people who are
making it on their own, or at least
trying to, have a fierce sense of their
independence and. are sometimes
quite difficult to work with.
"They will complain about con-
ditions, but when we suggest a move
to a better location, they usually re-
sist going, even though it means that
they would be moving to a safer
neighborhood, where they would be
close to a synagogue or shopping."
Nathan Davidoff and Ernest
Schwartz both maintain residences
in the city not because of a great de-
sire to be there, but out of sheer eco-
nomic necessity. Davidoff, who was
born on the East Side and has lived in
a cramped apartment on Seward for
the past 20 years, has nothing but
bitter feelings for the city and its
people.
"The neighborhood was, going
downhill when I moved in. Now, it
has hit rock bottom and I don't see it
coming back. If I had the money, I'd

Martha Sanfield spends part of her afternoon in the dayroom of the Ambassador —
Convalescent Center on Woodward.

Lifetithe Detroit resident Rose Greenberg in her room at the L and L foster care home. Rose,
71, lived in a nearby foster care facility for 15 years before moving into the L and L last
spring.

troit city limits, was the brainchild of
Rabbi Solomon Gruskin. Rabbi
Gruskin was the chaplain at the
Northville Regional Psychiatric
Hospital. He convinced the Jewish
Community Council to start a pro-
gram to aid Jews who were mentally
ill. In the mid-1970s, when changes
in the state's mental health care pro-
grams were instituted, many of these
Jews were de-institutionalized and
sent back to their places of origin,
which, in most cases, meant Detroit,
according to Mrs. Menczer.
"The better places, in Oakland
County, refused to take them and
they didn't have to because they were
funded by the state, rather than pri-
vately," Mrs. Menczer said. Of the
200 men and women currently re-
ceiving Project Outreach assistance,
about half live in nursing and foster
care facilities, while the others live
independently. -
The independents, some of whom
actually live on the street, moving
through the city's various shelters for
the homeless, are often tougher to
provide for than those in institutions,
according to Mrs. Menczer. "The ones

move to the suburbs in a minute .. .
Nobody cares about people down
here. Hell, most people don't even
know about us."
Schwartz, an elderly gentleman
who remembers the exact date he
came to this country from Hungary
(Oct. 3, 1920) but is hard pressed to
remember anything else, moved to
Detroit from Pennsylvania about 12
years ago. Life in the city has been a
struggle for most of those years,
Schwartz said, and he longs for his
home back east, even though he has
no family left there.
The L and L, an adult foster care
home, sits in the shadow of both the
General Motors Building and the
Fisher Building. But life at the L and
L is light-years, not just two or three
blocks, removed from the corporate
finance and Broadway theater at-
mosphere of ' the New Center. The
facility, which features small, but
clean rooms and a friendly staff, is
home for Rose Greenberg and Ethel
Cohen. Ethel has lived at the L and L
for 15 years and Rose for two months,
following a 15-year stay at the Lewis
Manor foster care facility on nearby

