Mentor Works?

outside the home, but few Orthodox
women work outside the home.
On the other hand, certain circum-
stances conspire to increase the via-
bility of large families. In the larger
Orthodox communities in which a
"Jewish neighborhood" is still a reali-
ty, an unusually high proportion of
grandparents help out with their
grandchildren.
Under this scenario, parents are
never freed of serious, familial, finan-
cial obligations.

What To Do

This level of commitment suggests
two things.
First, without denying the new
problems in the Orthodox communi-
ty that a larger population has
brought, the Orthodox reality is radi-
cally different from 60 years ago. Its
overall health and future have
immeasurably improved over the
post-World War II prospect of disap-
pearance.
Second, all religious questions
aside, the Orthodox and the non-
Orthodox live very different lives.
The number of children, their educa-
tion costs, the age at which one has
children, the duration of the finan-
cial help extended to them, all create
radically different lifestyles, priorities
and concerns.
Hammer suggests several changes
to make it possible for all Jewish
families to buck the two-century
trend of falling birthrates among
developed nations:
• Lower day school tuitions. This,
of course, applies only to parents of
day school students, but there is a
strong correlation between a high
Jewish birthrate and a high Jewish
education.
• Better childcare. In Israel —
where a high Jewish birthrate is a
national priority — municipalities
provide nurseries. Hammer suggests
that perhaps synagogues in the
United States could do this.
• A tighter support network for
children and parents.
This would include free-loan cen-
ters. To the extent free loans exist at
all in the U.S., they are mostly for
money. Broadly in Israel and rarely
in the U.S., there are free loans of

Mentor Works is a program that
recruits and trains volunteer
mentors to provide Oakland County
youth with additional
guidance and
support.

baby furniture — strollers, cribs,
beds, etc.
Put less elegantly, without a higher
Jewish birthrate, diaspora Jewry will
not survive. I I

Wiesel Returns Romania Star

How Do
I Get Involved?

New York/JTA — Elie Wiesel returned
Romania's highest honor after learning
that it also had been awarded to anti-
Semites.
Wiesel, an author who is probably
America's best known Holocaust sur-
vivor, accepted his native Romania's
National Star years ago, at a time
when the country's leadership was seen
as reconciling itself to the collabora-
tion of its Holocaust-era regime with
the Nazis. President Ion Iliescu —
who awarded Wiesel the star in 2002
— awarded it this week to two leaders
of the Greater Romania Party,
Cornelia Vadim Tudor and Gheorge
Buzatu. Tudor, Buzatu and their ultra-
nationalist party have published anti-
Semitic and Holocaust denial material.

If you would like to learn more about becoming a volunteer
mentor, or would like to find a mentor for your child or teen,
please call (248) 559-1500, or email us at

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— Allan Gale, Jewish Community
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