Participants
in a Jewish
Vocational
Service
program
credit it with
pulling them
up by the
bootstraps.
PHOTOS BY DANIE L LIPPI TT
1
JULIE EDGAR STAFF WRITER
ich Levinson remembers
sitting on his bedroom floor
sobbing, his wife and teen-
aged daughter crying be-
side him.
How would he tell his moth-
er he wouldn't be visiting her in
Pittsburgh the next day because
he just lost his job, a position he
took despite a very comfy situa-
tion in an accounting firm?
\/
His daughter, 13 at the time,
already "thought it was the end of
the world," Mr. Levinson recalls.
He was sure his-mother would
think him a failure. Jewish men
don't lose their jobs. If they aren't
working, it means they either
have overly indulgent parents or
N fat trust funds.
But the economy is a great
equalizer, and these days, it is no
respecter of status or education
— the very things that once in-
sulated Jewish professionals from
its cruel vagaries.
"Generally, Jews are not un-
employed, so the world thinks.
We've been taught you don't dis-
cuss those things, but downsizing,
layoffs, etc., do not target religion,
they target people," says sales
manager Michael Silverton, twice
a casualty of market forces and
corporate downsizing.
Mr. Levinson's mother re-
sponded to the news this way:
How can I help? And his friends
/—
rallied around him, too, although
he figures they were probably
\_D
Rich Levinson got the emotional support he needed.
thinking, "There but for the grace
of God go I," he laughs.
Mr. Silverton and Mr. Levin-
son both eventually landed jobs
they love, but finding them meant
climbing their way out of an abyss
of depression and anxiety. It
wasn't easy.
They credit programs at Jew-
ish Vocational Service with eas-
ing them into a process of intense
soul searching that boosted their
self-esteem and helped them get
on with their lives.
One of them, the 4-year-old
Corporate Opportunity Program,
helps casualties of economic re-
structuring reassess their skills
and re-enter the job market
armed with new ones. Typically,
the program attracts men be-
tween the ages of 40 and 60 who
have never had to write a resume
or even face a job interview but
have been through some sort of
corporate outplacement program.
They usually earn a minimum of
$40,000 and carry the twin bur-
dens of college tuition and mort-
gages, says JVS executive director
Barbara Nurenberg.
"These are people who always
did the right thing," she says.
The Corporate Opportunity
Program is part ofJVS's compre-
hensive career-development ser-
vices, which include psychological
and personality testing, resume
writing, interviewing techniques,
salary negotiations and job place-
ment. Resources like telephones
and reference books are available
to job seekers at the center.
When she joined JVS 25 years
ago, Ms. Nurenberg says, people
talked about how Jews could pen-
etrate the corporate sphere, a
whitewashed world that was off-
limits to them.
"Now our problem is not get-
ting people into the executive
suite. The primary issue is re-
structuring. Many Jews are in the
upper corporate levels now. When
corporations merge, how many
CEOs do they need?" she says.
Downsizing, or the sacrifices
corporations make to ensure a
more profitable future, has crept
up on the highly educated popu-
started a month-long seminar
called "My Job, Myself," which ex-
plored the often entangled issues
of personal identity and job and
ways to reassess one's work-skills
objectives. He also learned to talk
to his family honestly.
Then Mr. Levinson moved onto
the networking sessions with Wal-
ter Tarrow, the head of the Cor-
porate Opportunity Program,
where Mr. Levinson polished his
interviewing skills through role
playing and networked with oth-
ers who also suddenly found
themselves out of work.
"Clearly, it was a support
group," he says. "We weren't al-
lowed to feel sorry for ourselves.
We were told that we had the job
of looking for a job, and that it was
a temporary situation."
Mr. Levinson learned much
more than how to re-enter the
workaday world. He realized he
didn't want to work for anybody
but himself. He also learned to see
himself more clearly.
"They helped me to step back
and see I was worthwhile, that I
didn't need to beg for a job. I had
skills people needed," he says.
Mr. Silverton, 55, found him-
self in the Corporate Opportuni-
ty Program twice, the first time
after he dissolved a business part-
nership in an office-supply store
five years ago. The second time,
the company he worked for went
out of business.
lation, and giddy unemployment
figures don't reflect that reality,
Ms. Nurenberg points out. The
kind of jobs that are being creat-
ed are generally lower wage, and
many people do not re-register for
unemployment benefits, even if
they haven't found work.
`The Jewish community has a
lot of people in the wrong segment
of the economy. We don't have a
lot of people looking for service-
oriented jobs like in the fast-food
industry," she says.
Despite the misgivings of his
wife Susan, Mr. Levinson, 56, left
a consulting job at a CPA firm to
work with an old colleague who
needed an operations manager for
his software company. Within six
months, the partners went their
separate ways, and he found him-
self on the street.
"I was 52 years old and scared
s," Mr. Levinson says. "I
had all these messages: People
won't hire somebody your age; you
don't have technical skills."
He printed up 500 resumes and
talked to everybody he knew, but
the emotional chaos that followed
the loss of the job made it difficult,
if not impossible, to move on. His
rage was like a
black hole that
sucked the con-
fidence out of
him.
Mr. Levinson
says pride pre-
vented him
from really
spilling his guts
to members of
his family, but
at least they
knew he was
out of a job. Ms.
Nurenberg says
it's not uncom-
mon for some
men to go weeks
without telling
their families
they aren't
working.
"My role was
protector,
provider, and I
had to keep up
the facade," Mr.
Levinson re-
calls.
A friend re-
Walt Tarrow runs the Corporate Opportunity Program.
ferred him to
JVS, where he
GETTING REAL page 60