Stepping up fight against poverty

JEWISH ORGANISATIONS may need to do more to prevent community members falling into poverty, according to the head of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR).

Although Dr Jonathan Boyd acknowledged that much was being done to help those in financial difficulty, little attention was paid to preventing poverty in the first place.

“Importantly, poverty is not an overwhelmingly Charedi phenomenon,” he wrote in an online article published by the Jewish Leadership Council this week. “Whilst it is most prevalent in the Charedi sector, it is far from unusual in other parts of the Jewish community. Serious investment in poverty prevention work may well be an important priority going forward.”

JPR has just completed a piece of research commissioned by the JLC into social care organisations in the community to guide future policy.

It found that in areas of declining population, there could be an oversupply of care provision.

“It might suggest cost-saving organisational partnerships or mergers would make sense in these places,” Dr Boyd noted. “However, equally, it might suggest that there is greater need there. Jewish populations typically decline due to ageing and ageing populations require high levels of care, particularly when younger generations have moved out of the area.”

Overall, JPR found 549 organisations and 702 services or facilities in the Jewish care sector.

Many of these are small loan funds and similar initiatives in the Charedi community. With these excluded, there remained 70 separate organisations and 205 services or facilities.

A quarter of Jews aged 65 or over — more than 14,000 people — have a health condition or disability that has lasted, or is expected to last, at least a year, Dr Boyd reported. There were places for 2,126 people in Jewish care homes.

The research was the first step in a process to help make the social care field as “efficient and effective as possible”.

‘Serious investment may be an important priority’