Jews on the Move:Are We a Local or a National Community?
GOLDSTEIN, SIDNEY
JEWS ON THE MOVE Are We a Local or a National Community? SIDNEY GOLDSTEIN American Jews are on the move. And in the future they are likely to move more. These moves have implications for the...
...Together, these changes help explain such associated demographic features as later marriage, low fertility, more interfaith marriage and more divorce, all of which may reinforce the tendency to greater mobility that has resulted from educational and occupational patterns...
...Especially significant is the sharply rising proportion of Jewish women in the labor force, as high as 75 percent of those age 25 to 44...
...Jews have shifted increasingly into professional, technical and managerial positions and out of family businesses...
...We need to reeducate community leaders to recognize the evolution of a national Jewish society and the need to cope with the problems associated with that development...
...It would also help reduce the reluctance of many individuals to join organizations and temples in their new community of residence, particularly when membership requires substantial contributions to building or endowment funds...
...Reflecting these shifts, the 1990 American Jewish Year Book (American Jewish Committee and Jewish Publication Society) shows that seven of the 30 largest Jewish communities were south of Washington, D.C., compared to only one in 1935, and the West had doubled its share of the largest communities from three to six...
...What part can the national and local Jewish communities play in response to the challenges presented by these demographic changes...
...In an earlier period, Jewish regional distribution was heavily affected by the tendency of Jewish immigrants to settle in their ports of entry, particularly New York...
...While the difficulties of living Jewishly in a small town are manifold, an upsurge in movement to such places may enhance the quality of Jewish life for many small Jewish communities...
...The latest American Jewish Year Book lists 450 places with less than 5,000 Jewish inhabitants...
...These are steps in the right direction, but the effectiveness of such a national network remains to be tested...
...Another reason may be a generally lower desire to affiliate among the highly mobile— reflecting their specific combination of socioeconomic characteristics...
...Headlines like these tell only part of the story: "Population Shifts Create New Problems for Jewish Federations," "South Dakota's Lone Rabbi Travels Far and Wide to Sell Judaism to All," 'Jewish Outposts in Dixie," "Being Jewish Where There Is No Community," "Being Jewish in the Sticks...
...Where do they use services...
...In either event, the lower Jewish affiliation rates associated with mobility may, in turn, contribute to high rates of integration and assimilation into the larger community and thereby affect the strength of ties to the Jewish community/and to Judaism...
...major centers of Jewish population concentration will decline and new centers with quite different characteristics will grow...
...The effects of two other recent changes in residential patterns deserve attention: bi-local residence and the migration of the aged...
...Surprising as it may seem, Jews seem to be moving to small towns...
...Do bi-local residence and retirement migration argue for national fund-raising efforts and allocation mechanisms...
...To which community should contributions go...
...If, for whatever reason, including failure of immigrants to choose a community, a quota of settlers is not filled, the community is expected to contribute $1,000 for each immigrant below the quota...
...That the level of mobility of the Jewish community has risen in recent decades is indicated by evidence from local community surveys.* For example, a 1987 Rhode Island study showed that 45 percent of the state's American-born Jews had moved to Rhode Island from another state, compared to only one-quarter of those surveyed in 1963...
...But for most, innovative institutional changes designed to incorporate such communities into the web of the regional and national Jewish scenes are the key to enriching their Jewish life and enhancing the Jewish identity of their residents...
...Migration within the United States (internal migration) may well be the most significant demographic factor in determining the growth or decline of local Jewish communities...
...Jews will continue to move with considerable frequency from one location to another...
...Several interrelated historic factors specific to the Jewish experience in the United States can help us understand the importance that migration has assumed among American Jews...
...In 1990, the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) found that more than 5.5 million Jews live in the United States—including those who report themselves as Jews by religion or as secular Jews...
...All kinds of opportunities for innovation are opened up: circuit-riding teachers, speakers, counselors and rabbis...
...For example, it could contribute to renewed vitality by bringing more Jews to small communities, thereby creating the density necessary to develop and maintain strong communal institutions...
...Only one-quarter of those in the last group who thought it likely that they would be leaving the state in the next three years belonged to a synagogue or temple...
...Geographically, therefore, the Jewish population is becoming a truly national American population...
...90 percent of these had no plans ever to settle in Rhode Island...
...As a result, residential clustering persists, concurrent with greater physical and cultural contact with other groups...
...Because the rest of the U.S...
...According to the 1990 NJPS, 45 percent of American Jews live in the South and West combined—22 percent in the South and 23 percent in the West...
...For some college students, B'nai B'rith Hillel and host families often serve such surrogate purposes...
...In the 1987 Rhode Island study, six of every 10 children (of all ages) living outside their parents' homes lived in another state...
...This relation can be found not only for those who have recently moved, say within three years, but also for those who expect to move...
...While the vast majority of America's Jews continue to live in metropolitan areas, a considerable and probably increasing number live in smaller Jewish communities, many of them removed from major centers of Jewish life...
...The regional distribution of American Jews is now much closer to the distribution of the population as a whole...
...By 1989, the southeast Florida metropolitan area, which did not rank among the top 30 settlement areas in 1935, came to include 512,000Jews to become the second largest Jewish population center in the United States...
...Each community has a quota of immigrants to absorb...
...For example, in the 1987 Rhode Island study, 70 percent of those adults who always lived in the state belonged to a synagogue or temple...
...After the 1920s, the number of Jews grew at a slower rate because of curtailed immigration, reduced fertility and, possibly, the effects of interfaith marriage and assimilation...
...The change in regional distribution is relatively well known...
...We will be more dispersed across metropolitan areas and across the nation...
...the Jewish population lived in the Northeast...
...Among those most affected by the failure to allow transfer of memberships are families with children, who may thereby refrain from enrolling in programs of Jewish education and social activities...
...Whether the ties developed in new communities of residence are adequate substitutes for the Jewish reinforcements offered by more frequent, direct interaction of parents, children and grandchildren is doubtful...
...it grew to 501,000 by 1989, making Los Angeles the third largest area of Jewish settlement in the country...
...Mobility is even greater among Jews living on the West Coast...
...regional meetings...
...Is divided residency used as a way to avoid commitments to one or both communities...
...Why are Jews who move less well integrated into the organized Jewish life of the community...
...For other mobile individuals and families, how can we develop the kinds of programs that help them connect both formally to the organized community and informally to other Jewish individuals and families...
...As a result, they are only part-time residents in each community...
...The willingness to share information on mobile persons, even when it leads to loss of contributions to the community of origin, must be given priority...
...they were no longer an insignificant minority but a substantial, vibrant segment of American society...
...These moves have implications for the vitality and character of the American Jewish community that have yet to be faced...
...On the plus side, for some small communities, migration may constitute the blood transfusion that is needed for survival and growth...
...Older, larger communities will find their institutions declining and underused...
...traveling libraries, exhibits and Judaica shops...
...More than 325 had less than 1,000 Jews...
...The third factor affecting the demographic experience and characteristics of the American Jewish population and more directly accounting for high internal migration rates is the impressive success achieved in the struggle for acceptance into the larger American society...
...Only 27 percent of all San Francisco Bay Area Jews surveyed in 1986 were born in California and more than four of every 10 of them thought it likely that they would move within the next three years...
...An effort in this direction has been initiated nationally by the Jewish Community Center Association, formerly called the Jewish Welfare Board, through establishment of the Shalom Newcomers Network to help newcomers plant new Jewish roots...
...Moreover, mobility and turnover are likely to continue to be high...
...Another significant change in American Jewish demographics is decentralization at the local level—within metropolitan areas.* Inner cities and older suburbs, which have * Vivian KlafT, "The Urban Ecology of Jewish Populations: A Comparative Analysis," Contemporary Jewry 8 (1987), pp...
...The second major factor^ transforming the American Jewish community is a byproduct of the reduced role of immigration...
...We will certainly be a smaller percentage of the American population...
...In this way, migration can serve to strengthen both the individual's Jewish identity and the community as a whole rather than weaken either or both...
...The more than 200 federations in the Council of Jewish Federations have agreed to share equitably the cost of settling Soviet immigrants...
...By 1927, Jews constituted 3.6 percent of the total population...
...We need to adopt and employ a concept of what Carmi Schwartz, former executive vice-president of the Council of Jewish Federations, has called "portable locability" to allow people who move to change local community loyalties while maintaining loyalty to the larger community...
...At the same time, Jews still tend to relocate where there are other Jews, even though they will not be a majority of the residents...
...It is clear that the migration of the aged, like that of younger Jews, presents challenges to the community...
...exchange programs with larger communities...
...Their outreach services provide community fact sheets and guides to newcomers and information exchanges between the sending and receiving communities about the mobile people...
...Internal migration also has serious implications for the Jewish identification of mobile Jews and for the development of a national Jewish community...
...Then immigration from Russia, Poland and other East European countries swelled the American Jewish population to more than 4 million by the end of the 1920s...
...The Los Angeles Jewish population in 1935 numbered just under 100,000...
...In 1935, the three metropolitan areas with the largest Jewish populations were New York/northeast New Jersey (2.6 million), Chicago (378,000) and Philadelphia/southern New Jersey with 312,000...
...The Northeast declined to 44 percent...
...The national dispersion of children away from parents—and of brothers and sisters apart from each other— means that many families are dependent on airplanes and telephones to maintain a semblance of the intimacy that former proximity of residence allowed...
...had dense concentrations of Jews, have been experiencing population decline...
...Underlying the changing regional, metropolitan and small town residential patterns is population mobility (migration...
...What do all these statistics mean...
...Such an arrangement would facilitate integration into the new community...
...That money goes into a pool to be allocated, in turn, to communities exceeding their quotas...
...Many American Jews, especially older ones, maintain more than one residence...
...We can, therefore, no longer think of ourselves locally...
...Or should there be a system of sharing with community of origin...
...The annual number of immigrants from the Soviet Union, Israel and other countries has probably not yet been large enough even to replace the number of aged, foreign-born Jews who die each year...
...One reason is probably local barriers to membership—lack of contacts and information, high initiation fees, residence in areas that are not easily accessible to communal institutions...
...56-59...
...More and more children are growing up in communities other than those in which their parents were socialized and in which they themselves were born...
...We must think of ourselves nationally...
...It was preceded only by New York/northeast New Jersey, which by 1989 had declined to 2,022,000 Jews...
...In addition, many people now change their residence completely on retirement...
...Their communities of destination may face the burden of caring for a disproportional number of people who have retired on marginal incomes and who face health, housing and financial problems...
...Just over one-quarter of the adult population had moved within the preceding five years...
...Migration also leads to the dispersion of family members...
...Even within a given metropolitan area Jewish dispersion leads to lower Jewish density...
...First is the dramatic growth of the Jewish population, from only slighdy more than 1,000 in 1790 to a quarter million by 1880...
...At the time of the survey 85 percent of those age 18 and over were living in a city other than where they were born...
...A recent development in connection with Soviet Jewish immigration to the United States shows evidence of the growing recognition of the emergence of a national Jewish society and the need for individual communities to share responsibilities...
...This can be done best by providing the national and regional institutional networks essential to maintaining the linkages of individual Jews to the larger community and by facilitating the linkages among communities, including smaller to larger ones...
...High mobility seems to be associated with a lower level of Jewish identification, as indicated by Jewish values, personal religious observance, synagogue membership and organizational affiliation...
...Its full implementation, however, rests on other than technical considerations, mainly a willingness on the part of communities to share information...
...How can the larger Jewish community provide services to its now more mobile and more dispersed constituencies...
...The balance were in the Midwest...
...this declined to only 59 percent of those who moved into the state in the five to nine years before 1987 and to just under half of those living in the state less than five years...
...the newer suburbs and exurbia, with their more dispersed Jewish populations, have grown...
...Institutional arrangements must also be developed to allow the transfer of individual and family memberships from one community to another, even when the organizations involved are local...
...Jews have reached new heights in educational achievement and occupational choice and have great freedom in selection of place of residence...
...only 12 percent lived in the South and West combined...
...Today, more than 90 percent of American Jews are native born, and half or more of these are third- and fourth-generation Americans...
...In the end, the individual and the AYnerican Jewish community as a whole will benefit...
...By 1990, two-thirds of adult Jews had attended college or technical school, and more than twice as many Jews as the general population had gone on to graduate school...
...In the twenty-first century, the number of Jews in America may decline...
...Should the communities in which the aged are recent migrants and to which they have given litde, if any, of their past charitable contributions be expected to bear the major responsibility of covering the costs of providing services...
...In the age of computers, development of a national system to exchange information on mobile families could be extremely helpful...
...Before assessing consequences in greater depth, we need to look at some of the more important changes in the distribution of American Jews...
...How does one avoid the weakened links to the organized community lest they have negative consequences in the long run for ties to Judaism...
...Retirement from the labor force also contributes to high mobility, as the aged move to more favorable climates...
...population has grown at a faster rate, Jews are now only about 2.2 percent of the total American population...
...To the extent that residential clustering has helped to perpetuate those Jewish values and institutions essential to the functioning of the community, they are increasingly threatened by the dispersion of the population...
...If dispersal has weakened the family's role, can the local and national communities provide alternate ways to enhance a sense of belonging and to serve as instruments of concern and socialization...
...In recent decades, the American Jewish community has had to depend 25 substantially on itself to maintain its numbers...
...Some form of 'Jewish Community Express card" that has national value and carries with it credits for contributions made elsewhere seems essential...
...greater reliance on television, video, fax and computers as well as on regional newspapers for communication and teaching...
...These are conditions we can do something about...
...Now regional distribution is more affected by changes in Jewish occupational distribution, which in turn is related to the high levels of education, including the education of women, that have come to characterize the Jewish population...
...What challenges and opportunities do they present to the Jewish community...
...cooperative shopping for kosher food...
...For newer Jewish communities, regional redistribution and dispersion mean that whole new institutional structures must be created where before there had been few or none...
...High mobility can have positive— and negative—consequences for the American Jewish community...
...In 1930, 68 percent of...
...Which community is responsible should the need for care arise...
...In the same survey one-quarter of all respondents thought they were likely to move in the next three years...
...and weekend retreats to reduce the sense of isolation that characterizes Jewish enclaves in small places...
...The proportion of self-employed has declined substantially as more have taken positions in national and local corporations...
...The 1990 NJPS demonstrated the high mobility that characterizes American Jews...
...This sharing of responsibility provides a model for use in other areas affected by the mobility of American Jewry...
...On the other hand, high levels of migration, involving movement away from family and from centers of Jewish institutional and population concentration—especially repeated movement—may weaken individual ties to local communities and consequently lessen Jewish identity on both attitudinal and behavioral levels...
Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4
