Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final article in a series about Jewish Family Service of San Diego’s centennial celebration, and eight women who will be honored at the organization’s gala on April 21. To see previous stories please click on the number in the series: 1, 2, 3.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO –When the eight women who will be honored at the Jewish Family Service gala on April 21 posed for portraits, they all wore roses – a fitting tribute to the woman who started it all 100 years ago, Rose Neumann.
Up until the current executive director Michael Hopkins broke the pattern, Jewish Family Service has been led by female executives throughout its century. Neumann was followed by Jeanette Tobias, who in turn, was followed by Henrietta Rubenstein, Marianne Kaye, and Jill Spitzer, the latter being Hopkins most immediate predecessor.
Spitzer, who served as executive director for 26 years, is one of the eight women honorees whose ages span several generations and who represent the continuing leadership provided to JFS by donors, volunteers, and staff members. In addition to Spitzer, the honorees who will be feted at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine are Marsha Berkson, Jenny Daniel, Estee Einhorn, Inge Feinswog, Kira Finkenberg, Evelyn Rady, and Lois Richmond.
Recently, Jewish communal historian Joellyn Zollman discussed with San Diego Jewish World some noticeable themes throughout the 100-year history of Jewish Family Service. She paid tribute to Neumann, the hard-working, original leader whose priorities of case work, refugee assistance, and help for the elderly have remained essential elements of the Jewish Family Service mission.
Zollman, a Brandeis University PhD in Jewish Studies who curated the exhibit on San Diego’s Jewish community that is currently on display at the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park, recently compiled a history of JFS that will be published in the upcoming Spring/Summer issue of the Western States Jewish History quarterly.
One of the things that she noticed at JFS “from beginning to end is female leadership,” she commented. “I joke that there are the four founding mothers of JFS – the Hebrew Sisterhood, the Jolly 16, the Junior Charity, and the Ladies Hebrew Aid Society. These were four Jewish benevolent societies in San Diego that came together in 1918 and realized that they were essentially doing the same thing in the community, and that it didn’t make sense to repeat the work of another organization in a town this small. So, they came together to better serve the community.”
Neumann, who had been affiliated with the Hebrew Sisterhood at Tifereth Israel Synagogue (which then was Orthodox, but today is Conservative), was chosen to head up the consolidated organization. “She was the real force behind JFS,” Zollman commented.
During its 100-year history, JFS had four names. It began as Federated Jewish Charities, continued from 1936 to 1952 as the Jewish Welfare Agency, morphed from 1952 to 1962 into the Jewish Social Service Agency, and since 1962 has been Jewish Family Service. To simplify our discussion, Zollman referred to the agency as JFS, no matter which era in its history she was discussing.
“I sometimes joke it should be called Jewish Female Service because you have Rose Neumann right at the beginning of this, and then you have this continuum of women—most recently Jill Spitzer from 1986 to 2012,” Zollman said. “One of the things that makes San Diego unique is that in other towns and cities, usually around the time the Jewish Welfare Society came into being, around 1936, social work became professionalized and usually that meant men coming in and taking over. As long as women were at the fore, in those other cities, JFSes were volunteer organizations, with women being what one historian called ‘caretakers of the larger house of Israel.’” In San Diego, professionalization did not bring with it male leadership. “I could not say for sure why, but I guess it was a combination of the force of some of the female personalities here in San Diego, and the fact that the community was small and there might not have been professional Jewish male social workers around. A combination of these factors led to women being in charge…”
Neumann, indeed, was a force to be reckoned with, said Zollman admiringly. “She seemed to have an unending amount of energy. She came here in 1911 from Brooklyn, and obviously found a very different community here in San Diego. She came with her husband Al, who had a furniture business, and she was shocked at how little the Jewish community was doing here. She set out to make it her mission for the rest of her life to build a really vibrant Jewish community in San Diego. She was involved in a lot of organizations, but she spent most of her time running JFS.”
Casework
Two letters that Zollman found in archives help to portray Neumann. One was an answer to a rabbi in Sacramento, who asked her to explain just exactly what her agency did. “She told him that it was primarily casework helping people solve their individual problems. One of the main issues they had was what they called ‘transients.’ Lots of people came to California to escape money problems, to make a new start, or for whatever reason. Maybe they were not on good terms with their families. So Rose Neumann would get a telegram from the Jewish Welfare Society of Cleveland, for example, asking “Have you seen Mr. Goldberg? This is what he looks like and we think he came to your town.’ She would go knock on doors and say, ‘Are you Mr. Goldberg?’ She was pretty fearless. Sometimes she would describe situations like ‘I went down to a sketchy neighborhood where there is a woman recovering from tuberculosis, and her husband wants her to come home. I knocked on her door, and she doesn’t want to go.’” She did this kind of case work herself. She didn’t send other people to do it, although sometimes members of the Jolly 16 (which began as a Jewish sewing circle) would go with her, and perhaps take their husbands.
“They were also helping people who didn’t have enough to eat, or needed a place to live,” Zollman continued. “San Diego wasn’t a big enough town then for there to be a Jewish hospital or even a Jewish Home for the Aged, and so they would drive old people to doctors appointments, help them make those appointments, and even pay for those doctor appointments, if they needed that. They would visit people in the hospital, and provide those kind of services that make you feel connected to the community.”
Today Jewish Family Service serves thousands of clients, 85 percent of them not Jewish. But in Neumann’s day, JFS dealt with Jews, Catholic Charities dealt with Catholics, and the YMCA served primarily Protestants, Zollman said.
Peoplehood
The organizations that formed Jewish Family Service were drawn from the only two congregations in San Diego at the time – Beth Israel and Tifereth Israel—as well as secular organizations. There developed a sense of “peoplehood” that regardless of whether people were Orthodox or Reform (the Conservative movement came later), or not at all religious, they were all part of the Jewish people, who needed to be served. So as not to become identified with any single religious movement within the Jewish community, JFS had informal rather than formal relationships with rabbis, Zollman said. Traditionally, no rabbi served on the board of Jewish Family Service, but rabbis as individuals and JFS often cooperated.
For example, said Zollman, Rabbi Jonas Wrottenberg of Tifereth Israel Synagogue, which then was located on 18th Street downtown, “would go down in the morning to the harbor with an assistant, perhaps a newly arrived immigrant, and he would buy fish from a fisherman at a really cheap price. He would wrap them up in newspaper, give them to the assistant, who would take a trolley to take them to Rose Neumann, who lived in North Park. All the trolley operators knew to say ‘All beards off here’ at Rose Neumann’s stop because religious Jews wore beards, and then Rose would clean the fish and distribute them to hungry people in the community.”
In an aside, Zollman said that Michael Hopkins, the current CEO of JFS, loves that story, once exclaiming, “We do the same today; we have fishermen who donate fish to us here.” Hopkins showed Zollman a freezer full of fish. “He loves this story because it is an example of continuity, of what the mission has been.”
Refugees
In addition to individual casework, JFS has had an historic interest in helping to settle refugees. Other correspondence uncovered by Zollman detailed the trouble that Neumann had in awakening the rest of the Jewish world to the plight of destitute Jewish refugees in San Diego’s next-door neighbor city of Tijuana, Mexico.
“In the 1920s, Jewish immigration to the United States slowed to a trickle because of strict immigration laws passed by the U.S. Congress,” Zollman said. “Yet, Jews increasingly were needing to get out of Europe. It was much easier to get into Mexico than the United States and that is why we saw increased immigration to Mexico in the 1920s. Some of the Jews who went there hoped to use it as a stepping stone to the United States, and a portion of that community settled right on the border in Tijuana, hoping that as soon as the U.S. eased the restrictions they might be able to come over.”
However, Zollman added, “A large number of them were extremely destitute and Rose Neumann became very concerned about this community. She had a problem, though, which was that the money she raised for Federated Jewish Charities was for the San Diego Jewish community, so she could not in good conscience spend it on Jews in Tijuana.” Neumann wrote to the B’nai B’rith organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City hoping to find help, but each organization, in essence, responded, this was not their problem.
In one letter, Neumann told “a particularly compelling story of three sisters whom she was sure would be forced to turn to prostitution if they could not get jobs to feed themselves and get clothing and decent housing.” At one point, Neumann took a train up to Los Angeles to plead for assistance with various rabbis of that community, all to no avail. “She was outraged,” Zollman commented. “She came back to San Diego and decided she would have to create an organization herself, which she did, naming it something like the ‘Tijuana Jewish Relief Association.’ Then, she wrote letters to what seemed like every Jewish business owner in San Diego as well as to anyone who might have a business interest in Tijuana to try to get these Jews jobs.”
Zollman commented that this episode illustrates that “Rose Neumann in the outpost community of San Diego saw herself as a link in the larger web of the Jewish world. She was saying ‘this is what we do, we take care of each other. I might be here in San Diego, but you in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York should be interested in this because Jews take care of one another.’ They weren’t interested, and it tells a lot about her character that she just went out and solved that problem herself.”
Neumann retired in 1947, but her programs for aiding the Jews of Tijuana paved the way for JFS, under the leadership of Jeanette Tobias and Henrietta Rubenstein, to help resettle Holocaust Survivors following World War II. This process involved helping the refugees to find housing and jobs in San Diego, and additionally to acclimate them to American culture.
That experience in turn led to JFS participating with the national Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees who were airlifted to Camp Pendleton in 1975 following the fall of Saigon, and also in the resettlement in San Diego of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union. Today, JFS remains involved in resettlement services, helping people from all over the world, including currently refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Elderly assisance
A third area of continuity in the JFS story was help for the elderly. In 1944, the community established in a residence a home for the aged that housed ten residents. Eventually it expanded to the Hebrew Home for the Aged which in the late 1950s was built on 54th Street on a bluff overlooking the Jewish Community Center. This complex eventually was sold to help finance the transition to the more modern Seacrest Village Retirement Communities in Encinitas in 1989 and in Poway in 1996.
Early on, JFS recognized the need not only to provide institutional care for the elderly, but also to provide social and recreational opportunities for elderly people still living in their homes. “Under Marianne Kaye, the first senior center opened in 1973,” near Beth Jacob Congregation’s previous home on 30th Street in the North Park area, Zollman related. Over a short period of time, this “Drop-In Center” served over 500 seniors. A nine-passenger automobile, which, eerily, had been converted from a hearse, was used to transport seniors from their homes to the center. Additionally, during this period, another senior center was opened in North County, Zollman commented.
Subsequently, JFS opened older-adult centers in the College area, near San Diego State University, and at JFS’s main campus on Balboa Avenue in the Kearny Mesa area. Transportation for seniors continues to be an important aspect of JFS service with the “On The Go” Service regularly transporting older adults not only to these centers, but to doctor appointments, grocery stores, shopping centers, and other venues.
Although JFS has greatly expanded in the many years since Rose Neumann’s administration—going during Jill Spitzer’s administration from a budget of $500,000 in 1986 to $20 million, with 300 employees staffing more than 50 programs, in 2012–the basic missions remain the same, Zollman emphasized.
Today, JFS continues to help families in crisis, providing both material assistance and psychological counseling. It comes to the aid of refugees, acclimating them to life in San Diego County. And, it is a good friend, advocate, and companion to the elderly.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com