To Have And Have Not

A homeless man, one of an estimated 500 homeless people in the capital, sleeps in front of a trendy restaurant in the upscale German Colony section of Jerusalem. Photos by Michele Chabin

A homeless man, one of an estimated 500 homeless people in the capital, sleeps in front of a trendy restaurant in the upscale German Colony section of Jerusalem. Photos by Michele Chabin

by Michele Chabin
Israel Correspondent

Jerusalem — While Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was extolling the virtues of Israel’s economy during this week’s annual Herzilya Conference, an event that attracts the country’s top intellectuals, business leaders and security experts, Chani Ben-Eliyahu, a Jerusalem mother of five with another on the way, huddled in her dark, dank apartment in the Beit Yisrael neighborhood with all the lights off.
Dressed in a sweater and a winter jacket at 10 in the morning during an unusually cold snap last week, Ben-Eliyahu flipped on a light switch only when Hershel Puretz, the founder of an organization called Warm the Needy, knocked on her door. Inside, Ben-Eliyahu’s 3-year-old daughter, Sarah, slept in a stroller in her winter jacket, a blanket spread across her lap.
“I

put on the lights and the heater when the children come home from school,” Ben-Eliyahu explained, pointing to the apartment’s lone space heater, a donation from the organization. “I put it in the children’s room.”
The family pays $450 per month for a dilapidated two-bedroom apartment with a small living room, tiny kitchen and a bathroom that looks like it belongs in a third-world country. Its few windows — there is just one exposure — let in almost no light.
Were it not for the fact that Warm the Needy pays $110 toward her family’s bi-monthly electric bill, “we wouldn’t have any heat at all,” Ben-Eliyahu, a diabetic who cleans houses to supplement small subsidies from her husband’s yeshiva and National Insurance, confided. “They gave us the heater a couple of years ago, but we didn’t have money to keep it on. My children would beg me to plug in the heater and I’d say, ‘Soon, soon, just a little bit longer.’
“The children were always sick, hospitalized sometimes,” Ben-Eliyahyu said. “They still get a lot of bad colds. It breaks my heart...” she said, her voice trailing off.
Though the Israeli economy does appear to be on the upswing, with a 5 percent annual growth rate and the lowest unemployment rate (6.6 percent) in a decade, many Israelis aren’t reaping the benefits.
The problem is particularly acute in Jerusalem, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been wider.
Despite the influx of foreign investors and an abundance of luxury housing projects fetching anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 per square foot, Jerusalem is now the poorest city in Israel, according to the just-released Statistical Yearbook of Jerusalem, published by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.
One-third of all Jerusalem families live below the poverty line: 23 percent of Jewish families live in poverty, compared to 62 percent of Arab families. Seventy-six percent of the city’s Arab children are impoverished, compared to 44 percent of Jewish children.
Much, though certainly not all, of this poverty can be traced to low workplace participation. Only 45 percent of Jerusalemites work compared to 56 percent of Tel Avivians. The city’s two fastest-growing populations, haredi and Arab, ordinarily have one breadwinner per family — if that — and they are disproportionately represented in the poverty statistics.
“What’s really shocking is that 30 percent of Israeli families where both parents work subsist below the poverty line,” said Shirli Shavit, director of the international department at the Naamat women’s organization. “If you earn minimum wage, you can’t feed and clothe even two or three children. We’re not necessarily talking about large families.”
Naomi Sharabi, founder of Ezrat Avot, an organization that provides 400 hot meals and many other services to Jerusalem’s elderly and other needy, said the economic boom being celebrated elsewhere “is nowhere to be seen here. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and the poor get poorer while the rich get richer.”
On a visit to the home of a destitute family with 13 children, a bag of donated rolls in her hand, Sharabi said, “You have to see how people live here to believe it.”
Though the old stone townhouse, situated in a picturesque alleyway in the fervently religious neighborhood of Meah Shearim, looks quite ordinary from the outside, the inside is another story. “The family built a second story over a period of 20 years but they didn’t really complete the house,” Sharabi explained, walking through a tunnel-line stone corridor leading to a kitchen that, save for electricity and indoor plumbing, cannot have changed much in decades.
The cavernous, windowless stone room feels like a cave. Though the upstairs rooms are much newer, the paint is peeling from mold caused by inadequate insulation. There are some electric heaters on the upper floor, but it obviously hasn’t occurred to the two children at home this day to turn one on.
“Why aren’t you in school?” Sharabi asked the shy 11-year-old girl. “I’ve been home since summer vacation,” she replied faintly, averting her eyes. Her 17-year-old brother, who should also have been in school, explained what Sharabi already knows: that the girl is highly gifted and should be in a program for exceptional children. “She was supposed to be in an advanced program but the tuition is too expensive. The regular school won’t take her,” the boy said.
“The mother is terribly proud. She doesn’t like to complain about her problems,” Sharabi said, clearly upset to see the children, dressed in several layers against the cold, not attending school. “Something needs to be done here. The municipality doesn’t care. It refers the needy cases to nonprofits like us.”
While children grow up and hopefully become self-sufficient, Sharabi said, Israel’s elderly poor will be vulnerable till the day they die. “Elderly people who have worked their entire lives receive just 1,200 shekels a month ($300) in government pension money. Rent alone can cost more than that, leaving nothing for medicine or food or heat. The elderly who come to our clubhouse tell me they have a headache or heartburn. I can give them an aspirin or Tums but not their heart or diabetes medications.”
Puretz, a 29-year-old yeshiva student who runs Warm the Needy in the wee hours of the morning, said he is still shocked by the poverty he encounters on a daily basis. “I’ve seen what I’d never dreamed possible. Children sleeping on the floor, inadequate electricity. We’ve had city caseworkers approaching us to try to raise funds to fix live wires hanging from the walls.”
Puretz finds it both sad and ironic that the city is granting permits to build luxury apartments all over Jerusalem “which will make it hard for the middle class, and certainly the poor, to afford to live here.”
“Look at Romema,” he said of a haredi neighborhood near the Central Bus Station. “We know what poverty exists there, yet 4,000 to 5,000 very high-end apartments are being built there, almost all of them purchased by Jews from overseas.
“One of these days,” he said, “Jerusalem will be split right across the middle.”
Talia Livni, president of Naamat, says the yawning social gap bodes poorly for Israeli society.
“There used to be the feeling that this was one big home. Everyone felt everything belonged to them. Maybe there were rich people but we didn’t feel it. Money wasn’t the most important thing; building and contributing to the country was.”
“We’ve gained a lot materialistically,” Livni said, “but in the process we’ve lost our soul.”

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