News & Impact

Dear Friends,

Hal Plotkin

Where does a troubled Jewish teen who is being raised in a single-parent family on welfare and food stamps turn to find help and support in the Bay Area? What beyond spiritual support can a Rabbi who very much wants to help offer a family in crisis? More than 50 years ago our small family found our answer at Jewish Family and Children’s Services.

Our Rabbi referred us to JFCS when my mother came to him in tears. Through divorce, abandonment, my mother’s severe depression, and her frequent unemployment, the wolf was always at our door. JFCS was the one place we could turn where it was clear we would not be thrown away, where our lives mattered, where someone always called us back when they said they would, and where we were repeatedly reminded that we were part of something larger, a Jewish community that lived its values.

As a youth, I had no reason to believe in God given what I knew about my immigrant grandparent’s history and our own challenging family circumstances. There could be, however, no question that our local Jewish community existed because of the powerful way it intervened in our lives through JFCS. In the absence of God, I reasoned, these Jews would have to do. It took me many years of reciting the Shema to understand that was in the design all along.

Thus, our beloved Mr. Raas, z’l, a psychologist and social worker, came to our rescue. He applied his emotional intelligence, insight, deep wisdom, patience—and also his Rolodex (young people, think “contact list’)—to help us marshal the psychological strength and, when possible, the material resources we needed to make the most of what we had while we worked toward something better.

At the time, JFCS provided me with weekly, subsidized, adolescent psychological counselling to help me navigate my way into young adulthood. I began with renting my own apartment at age 18, working full-time, and attending community college at night. My cost for those weekly sessions? $2 each. Fifty-five years later I still recall many of those valuable conversations almost daily. Life is unfair, but we can ask others for help. We can often help ourselves in unexpected ways by helping others. The most important thing is to never give up. There are people who care.

Thanks to JFCS’ generous donors, people we didn’t know and most likely never met, we received family counselling, scholarship referrals for summer camp, and other services. The Jewish community gave us inclusion, compassion, and care. There was nothing similar we could find in the secular world, which often views poverty in the Jewish community through a deeply ingrained antisemitic lens.

Hal Plotkin and Keira Plotkin

In my early 20s, for example, I applied for an emergency financial aid grant at our local community college. I was hoping to pay for auto repairs that would allow me to stay in school while commuting to my job. The head of the financial aid office personally rejected my application after confirming my religion. “I have to save these limited funds for people who really need them,” he explained, as if he was simply stating incontrovertible facts. “There are plenty of rich Jews,” he said. “I suggest you go find a rich Jew.”

Decades after my $2 sessions, I was elected President of the Board of Trustees of the same community college district that had turned down my emergency financial aid application. The first thing I did was to make sure that the financial aid office no longer based its decisions on an applicant’s religion. I like to think that Mr. Raas would have been very proud.

Antisemitism is a thing of the past only for those who have never experienced it in the present. Which makes JFCS’ work even more vital during antisemitism’s current retransformation from latent to blatant.

Many years ago, JFCS intervened to help me and my family. Their message? We are there with you. You are not alone. You can make the same difference others made for me. You have God’s power in your hands. All it takes is making a gift to JFCS today.

It would mean a lot to me if you make that donation in honor of Mr. Alan Raas. LINK TO COME

Hal Plotkin
Award-Winning Journalist
Senior Open Policy Fellow at Creative Commons