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37
HOUSE CALLS MADE )
When explaining in an interview that the
department takes in youngsters from
"negative social environments that ham-
per their development," he mentioned
Aviv's Hatikva Quarter as an example.
This area used to be one of the more
notorious symbols of social deprivation in
Israel. But after the $30 million invested
there by Project Renewal since the later
1970s — more per capita than in any other
area — Hatikva has become a showcase of
what can be achieved through community
rehabilitation.
An argument frequently made by advo-
cates of large budget allocations for Youth
Aliya is that its services are necessary as
stopgaps when the government is forced to
cut back on welfare and educational ser-
vices provided in the community. This ap-
proach, however, cannot provide an alter-
native source of funding for the services
seen as needed by the government — it can
only offer a second-best and more expen-
sive substitute.
Youth Aliya continues
to take the most pro-
mising youth out of
these areas, while
Project Renewal looks
for ways to keep
them there.
A more creative and flexible approach to
the development and funding of social ser-
vices in Israel that avoids this type of
distortion in priorities has been established
by the Joint Distribution Committee's
Israel office. The JDC-Israel shares the ap-
proach common to the Ministry of Labor
and Social Affairs, Project Renewal and the
community center movement that puts the
stress on services in the community.
The JDC-Israel, as well as the Communi-
ty Center Corporation that runs 130
centers around the country, are also funded
by contributions from American Jews
channeled through the UJA — which only
compounds the anomaly of American Jew-
ish philanthropic funds backing programs
for the disadvantaged based on conflicting
principles.
The JDC-Israel, which has an annual
budget of $18 million, has developed a
system for using Diaspora funds to bolster
social service priorities that are set by the
government, without setting up its own
competing service network. So when the
government is forced to cut its budgets,
the JDC can step in to fill the gap in a way
that reinforces official welfare policies in-
stead of distorting them. It has been do-
ing this in services for the aged since 1969,
when Eshel — the Association for the Plan-
ning and Development of Services to the
Aged — was set up as a partnership be-
tween the JDC-Israel and the government.
For the past several years, the JDC-
Israel and the Ministry of Labor and
Social Affairs have been discussing setting
up a similar structure for children at risk,
which would aim at identifying and solv-
ing their problems at the earliest possible
stage. Dr. Brick of the ministry asserted
that "if we can get to these children and
their families before age six, through pro-
grams in the community, then they won't
turn up later as dropouts and other prob-
lem youth that now fill the institutions of
Youth Aliya."
This gets to the heart of the problem:
that Youth Aliya was never expected or
equipped to deal with the causes of the
distress that drove hundreds of thousands
of Jewish youth into its waiting arms. It
could not deal with the source of distress
in Nazi Europe; it could not deal with it in
the post-war upheavals and suffering; it
was not expected to deal with it in the
chaotic and depressing immigrant camps
in Israel during the mass immigration —
nor can it deal today with the causes of
distress that continue to produce youth
who are not realizing their potential.
In the past, no one else in Israel could
cope with these problems, either. But to-
day, other organizations — some of them
also funded by Diaspora contributions —
have the expertise, manpower and institu-
tions to cope with them and solve them.
What they lack is money, much of which
is still tied up in the outmoded programs
of Youth Aliya.
Changing the status quo is not a simple
matter, however. Allied with the en-
trenched professional and ideological in-
terests of the Youth Aliya department are
the political parties and organizations
whose residential schools depend to a great
extent for their continued existence on pre-
sent levels of support. The organizations
outside Israel, such as Hadassah, that
raise funds for these schools have vested
interests of another kind in the continued
existence of an extensive network of
residential education. If an expert panel
were to conclude that only 3,000 pupils a
year need residential education, instead of
the current 12,700, then many of these
schools would be forced to close or look for
other means of support. Fund-raising ef-
forts would have to be redirected to other
targets, which can be an awkward and
unpleasant task for an organization.
Most of these schools have ceased to
serve any kind of ideological indoctrination
function for the political movements they
are attached to, but they still comprise an
important pressure group within their re-
spective parties, which are represented in
the WZO and government coalition to
block it. And without powerful counter-
presgure from the Diaspora leaders of the
Agency, the political interests would suc-
ceed in obstructing change.
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