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.