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COOPERATIVE
Detroit's Jewish community reconnects with
`the old neighborhood' to offer helping hand
By Aaron Foley
New Michigan Media
L
ocal conversations about suburban residents coming to
the city of Detroit tend to revolve around downtown and
Midtown, as if there's a transporting device that beams
crowds of people for sporting events, concerts and the like.
Do residents from the 'burbs ever come to less alluring
places in the city and work collaboratively with Detroiters to
strengthen their neighborhoods?
They do, and in increasing numbers, from Detroit's Jewish
community. Project Healthy Community, born from a sermon
by Temple Israel Rabbi Josh Bennett, is
expanding at a steady clip. Since its incep-
tion last spring, more initiatives have been
added, more volunteers have stepped up,
more community members have benefitted
and more people are taking notice.
With Detroit's bankruptcy and uncertain
road to recovery as a backdrop, Rabbi
Bennett delivered a sermon last year at the
West Bloomfield-based temple (that was
Rabbi Joshua
founded in Detroit), inviting congregants to
Bennett
return to "the old neighborhood," extending
an opportunity for members of the Jewish
community who had grown up — or had family ties in — in
northwest Detroit to perform ongoing community service in
the area. "It's the idea of social justice that we as Jews should
care about," Bennett says, reflecting on the sermon.
Bennett and a few others would approach the Northwest
Activities Center, a facility that 40 years ago was the Jewish
Community Center, about service there. "We really started off
with just a team of five or six of us."
Now, the work in the community has ballooned to hundreds
of volunteers assisting just as many families in the area.
Volunteers initially focused on the pantry at the Northwest
Activities Center, restructuring it for more healthy offerings
and better methods of food preparation.
While the largest and most extensive of the Jewish com-
munity's initiatives to collaborate with Detroiters in their own
neighborhoods, Project Healthy Community is not the first.
Hundreds of volunteers from the Jewish community continue
to be involved in child and adult literacy programs associ-
ated with many northwest Detroit schools, including Pasteur,
Hampton and Bagley.
Dr. Melvyn Rubenfire, along with his late wife, Diane, heard
Rabbi Bennett's sermon and took action. Currently a cardiolo-
gist at the University of Michigan health
system, Dr. Rubenfire prompted initiatives
to talk to Detroiters about nutrition and
health risks. It wasn't easy at first; no one
wanted to be lectured to, he said.
But by September of last year, "the
people who were coming through the line
said 'how can I help? - Rubenfire says.
Rubenfire's commitment to northwest
—
molt
Detroit stems from decades of service to
Dr. Melvyn
its residents while at Sinai Hospital, where
Rubenfire
he was its long-time chief of cardiology.
The rapid development of programs at
Northwest Activities Center, Hartford Memorial Baptist Church,
the Bagley neighborhood, MacDowell and Schultz elemen-
Ron Lockett, executive director and CEO of the Northwest Activity Center; Lisa Corey of Birmingham;
Warren Crockett of Detroit; Dr. Melvyn Rubenfire of West Bloomfield; Karen Sherbin of Farmington
Hills; Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel; Andre Peterson of Gleaners
tary schools and other locations now includes the revamped
"global" pantry; a summer camp in the city; an urban garden;
a "healthy backpack" program, where children's backpacks
are filled with food weekly to supplement meals at home; the
"fun pantry," where students are taught about the food groups
and farm-to-fork methods; dental and other health clinics; a
fellowship for a master's-level student who acts as a program
director for several of the directives; and a partnership with
the AARP to assist elderly members of the community.
"In the beginning, we started giving them food at the end
of the day," Bennett says. "Literally, it's a monumental change
from when we started. There are hundreds and hundreds of
volunteers making a huge difference in the city."
Initially, the vast majority of the program's volunteers were
from Oakland County. Now, a third of volunteers are estimated
to be from Oakland County and the western Wayne County sub-
urbs, another third are Northwest Detroit community members
and another third are high school and college volunteers.
The program relies on partnerships with Gleaners
Community Food Bank, Forgotten Harvest and the Jewish
Fund, the latter of which now provides $20,000 annually for a
part-time administrative assistant.
That the service has gone this long uninterrupted couldn't
have been predicted at its start, when there was unspoken
tension between suburban residents and city dwellers.
"Nobody was willing to sort of say it out loud," Bennett
says. "We didn't hear it off the bat, but there was defi-
nitely, there are cultural differences in terms of the way
our communities worked, and there was real animosity in
the relationships."
The barriers began breaking down slowly. Interfaith ser-
vices were held at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church and
Temple Israel. "A group of women from Hartford attended our
Passover Seder," Bennett cites as one example.
Rubenfire adds that suburban volunteers had to make clear
early on that they were not there to "take over."
"The vision is an interfaith, intergenerational mechanism to
get large numbers of volunteers to get communities to help
themselves," Rubenfire says.
Other Jewish communities are watching. Bennett says he
has been approached by Chicagoland Jews wondering about
going back to their "old neighborhoods" in the same fashion
as Metro Detroiters.
In the meantime, Project Healthy Community is continuing
to expand, including laying the groundwork now to hand out
at least 1,000 turkeys at Thanksgiving.
Perhaps the project's biggest accomplishment is bringing
people across borders, both physical and cultural, in the midst
of Detroit's financial, social and political distress.
"When we come in there, everybody's in Levi's. Everybody's
in a T-shirt. And it's just a lovefest. Everybody's hugging
everybody else," Rubenfire says.
About this series
I
Five minority media outlets with a combined estimated circulation of
120,000 weekly--Latino Press, The Michigan Citizen, The Jewish News,
The Michigan Korean Weekly, The Arab American News—are part of
New Michigan Media and are taking part in The Detroit Journalism
Cooperative (DJC). Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation, Renaissance Journalism's Michigan Reporting Initiative and
the Ford Foundation, the DJC aims to report about and create com-
munity engagement opportunities pertaining to the Detroit bankruptcy
and recovery. Each article in the series appears in all the NMM member
newspapers. This article is from THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS. The DJC
is a unique collaboration between important media outlets of the region,
and includes The Center for Michigan's Bridge Magazine, Detroit Public
Television, Michigan Public Radio, WDET and New Michigan Media. The
Detroit Free Press is also participating in the DJC effort.