#gemach

By Samuel G. Freedman, NY Times, December 2, 2011 When Hirshy Minkowicz was growing up in a Hasidic enclave of Brooklyn 30 years ago, he often noticed visitors arriving after dinner to meet with his father. They would withdraw into the study, speak for a time, then part with some confidential agreement having been sealed.

As he grew into his teens, Hirshy came to learn that his father operated a traditional Jewish free-loan program called a gemach. The visitors, many of them teachers in local religious schools, struggling to raise their families on small and irregular salaries, had been coming to borrow money at no interest and with no public exposure.

Now 39 years old and serving as the rabbi of a Chabad center near Atlanta, Rabbi Minkowicz has done something he never expected: open a gemach that deals primarily with non-Orthodox Jews in a prosperous stretch of suburbia. The reason, quite simply, is the prolonged downturn in the American economy, which has driven up the number of Jews identified by one poverty expert as the "middle-class needy."

The same phenomenon has appeared in Jewish communities across the country, albeit most often in those with existing Orthodox populations already familiar with the gemach system. This institution, rooted in biblical and Talmudic teachings and whose name is a contraction of the Hebrew words for "bestowal of kindness" ("gemilut chasadim"), is now meeting needs created by such resolutely modern causes as subprime mortgages, outsourcing and credit default swaps.

"I honestly never thought, in my realm here, to start a gemach," Rabbi Minkowicz said in a recent interview. "I thought people wouldn't understand it. It'd be a foreign concept. They hadn't grown up that way. But definitely, definitely, definitely the economy now is the worst. The 13 years I've been here, I've never seen people go from a regular life to rags. I've seen that up-front and personal."

It is difficult to determine the exact dimensions of the economy's impact on the Jewish population in general and on the surge in the use of gemachs specifically. The loan programs, often financed and run by families, operate on the basis of anonymity. Governmental statistics on poverty, unemployment, foreclosure and other such measures of the continuing malaise are not broken down by religion, as they are by race.

Still, the evidence points to an economic toll on Jews--not severe enough in most cases to plunge them into homelessness and destitution, or to qualify them for food stamps and Medicaid, but deep enough to destabilize what had been securely middle-class lives. Since the stock market collapse in late 2008 pushed the nation into recession, the demand for food and clothes from Jewish social service agencies and charities has risen by roughly 40 percent, according to their administrators.

"This area of the middle-class needy has just exploded," said William E. Rapfogel, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, which covers the New York area. "We've seen people who were making $75,000, even $200,000, lose a substantial portion of income. When they lose a job, they get another, but it's a job for less. They're so over-leveraged in their homes, they can't get out. If they sold, they wouldn't take out a nickel."