Cutbacks Hit Israeli Poor
For Israel's growing cadre of poor, government cutbacks take tough toll.
DINA KRAFT
Jewish Telegraph Agency
a
Ashdod, Israel
abriella Friedlander recently
stopped paying her mort-
gage.
"It was either paying the mortgage
or having electricity, water and gas,"
said the 38-year-old single mother, her
hands clasped tightly together on a
small crochet-covered table in her
dimly lit apartment.
Friedlander, who works part time as
a care-giving assistant for the elderly, is
amona b the swellina b ranks of Israel's
working poor. She works five hours a
day, six days a week, for a monthly
salary of $451. Government assistance
brings her income each month up to
about $700, but she still struggles to
make ends meet.
Massive government cutbacks in
social spending over the past year have
hit the working poor especially hard.
Friedlander now receives about $225
less in aid than she did before the cut-
backs. "It's killing us," she said.
Her reduced income means she can
no longer afford physical therapy for
her 11-year-old son who suffers from a
rare connective tissue disorder. It also
means that making the $383 monthly
mortgage payment on her apartment,
located in a block of run-down concrete
buildings in an impoverished Ashdod
neighborhood, is out of the question.
Meanwhile, Friedlander, who immi-
grated to Israel from Argentina in
1997, is sinking into debt. According
to Israeli government standards,
Friedlander is floating just above the
poverty line of $640 a month for a
household of two individuals.
More Are Downtrodden
The number of poor in Israel rose by
7.4 percent in 2003 to 1.42 million
people, according to the National
Insurance Institute 2003 poverty report.
That means that some 22 percent of
the population — or slightly more
than one in five Israelis — is living
below the poverty line. In 2002, 20
percent of the population lived in
poverty.
The gap between rich and poor in
Israel rises every year and is among the
highest
- in the Western world.
Children are especially hard hit: Of
12/24
2004
26
Single mother Gabriella Friedlander at her home in Ashdod
the 1.42 million Israelis living under
the poverty line, 653,000 were chil-
dren.
A financial crisis brought on by the
Palestinian intifada and a general eco-
nomic downturn has forced Israeli
Finance Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to engineer national aus-
terity budgets. And politicians of
both major political parties have
agreed for nearly a decade on the
need to drastically reduce Israel's
bloated public sector.
But experts say Netanyahu's eco-
nomic reform policies, which have
included dramatic cuts in public
spending on items such as welfare pay-
ments, have been especially tough on
the poor.
Not only children have felt the
impact: Single-parent families, large
families, Israeli Arabs and immigrants
also have been hit. They are among
the groups that in the past have bene-
fited from child subsidies that now
have been greatly reduced.
The violence of the intifada and the
world economic downturn have hurt
Israel's economy, but the rise in pover-
ty figures is attributed largely to the
government cutbacks.
Israel's economy is showing signs of
recovery, but full-time jobs paying
above the minimum wage can be hard
to find for the country's poorest seg-
ments.
Furthermore, much of the economic
growth is taking place at the top — in
the high-tech sector and among those
who invest in the stock market.
Unforeseen Woes
Friedlander has tried to find addition-
al work, posting ads in newspapers and
hanging signs on trees, but has had no
luck so far. She didn't foresee this situa-
tion when she immigrated to Israel.
Friedlander grew up in a middle-
class family in Buenos Aires, attended
Zionist schools and camps and saw
her future in the Jewish state.
For 40 years, my parents gave
money to the JNF and Hashomer
Hatzair and now I look at myself, hav-
ing to turn to aid associations for help.
It really hurts," she said.
Friedlander said she feels better off
than many of her friends who are also
single working mothers, because when
unexpected costs come up — her
refrigerator battery died last month,
for example — her family in
Argentina often sends money to help.
The number of single-parent Israeli
households beneath the poverty line
increased by 11 percent in 2003. Of the
60 percent of single parents who work,
30 percent do so only part-time, accord-
ing to statistics compiled by the Myers-
JDC-Brookdale Institute in Jerusalem.
Responding to the poverty report,
Netanyahu said the answer was to get
people back to work.
"That's the way to treat poverty —
to get people to go to work," he said.
He has said the previous welfare sys-
tem in Israel was bloated and helped
prevent the emergence of a modern,
capitalist economy.
The Finance Ministry said its poli-
cies were not to blame for the increase
in poverty. In a statement, the min-
istry said poverty grew between 1996-
2002, a time when welfare payments
were increased by 50 percent.
Jack Habib, director of the Myers-
JDC-Brookdale Institute, said one
problem is that the government's eco-
nomic reforms have not been coupled
with employment assistance. In fact,
he said, there is less money now for
job training than there used to be.
In a time of economic recession and
social spending cuts, the government
must do more than just tell people to
get jobs; it must help create those jobs
and facilitate the search for those look-
ing for work, he said.
"Clearly, there needs to be a major
national effort for employment,"
Habib said. "There needs to be
focused effort to make that happen."
With unemployment reaching 10.7
percent in 2003, Habib noted that
economic growth in Israel tends to be
based in the high-tech sector, which
rarely reaches lower-income groups.
The government is exploring new
ways to stop the growth in the poverty
rolls. Among new initiatives is an
experimental welfare-to-work pro-
gram. In addition, a government com-
mittee is looking into providing wage
subsidies for low-income workers to
increase the incentive to work and
reduce poverty, Habib said.
"The job market is not good for sin-
gle mothers, it is not sensitive to
them, it is harder for them to find
work," said Shiri Regev Messalem,
legal director of Itach, Women
Lawyers for Social Justice, an organiza-
tion that provides legal assistance to
women of low socioeconomic status.
Regev Messalem said that in the
year since the government's public
spending was cut back, an increasing
number of women have turned to
Itach for assistance.
"We are not getting so many queries
from people asking if they are getting
what they are owed at work, but
whether or not they can survive on the
salaries they are earning," she said.