NYANA has tried to compensate for the decline of its Refugee Resettlement Program... by branching out into areas like mental health and substance abuse services for immigrants of many nationalities, and helping to train immigrants in entrepreneurship.After 25 years on the job, it's only natural that Handelman would wish to move on. His resignation is still symptomatic of the fact, however, that the Jewish community as a whole still largely sees bringing the refugess to the US/Canada, and perhaps finding them jobs, as the end of the process -- while in fact it is just the beginning.
These programs have been successful, Handelman said, but “they are small compared to what we had been doing with refugee resettlement.”
A couple of years ago I interviewed Russian Jews living in Toronto. There are by some estimates 70,000 of them -- a rather large chunk of the local Jewish population -- and yet, almost none of them have anything at all to do with the organized Jewish community; they are only just beginning to create Jewish communities of their own, after 25 years in the city. This of-course is mostly to do with the fact they had little or no experience of Jewish community life back home, and usually no religious life either. The Federation is only just beginning to work out how to reach out to them in a systematic and suitable way, but doesn't have many resources for this, and what they do is for many, too little, too late.
I understand the situation is much the same in many other large cities across the US. I hope that their Jewish communities wake up to the fact there are hundreds of thousands of Jews from the FSU whom we struggled mightily to get here -- but have virtually neglected since.
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