20. JEWISH CHARITIES. On 26 April 1655, the board of directors of the Dutch West India Company wrote to Governor Stuyvesant as follows: "After many consultations, we have decided and resolved upon a certain petition made by said Portuguese Jews, that they shall have permission to sell and to trade in New Netherland and to live and remain there, pro vided the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation)' The records of the department of charities of the city of New York show that on 6 July 1916, in a Jewish population approximating 1,250,000 in Greater New York, in the alms house on Blackwell's Island there were 72 pauper Jews, of whom the majority were blind, idiotic or possessed of some peculiar defect which prevented admission to existing Jewish charitable institutions. These figures indicate how thoroughly the Jews of New York have assumed the responsibility imposed upon them over 250 years ago. The same is true of Jews throughout the United States. In our modern day, tinder more favorable conditions and auspices, the Jew has, to some extent, become non-sectarian in his philanthropies. Hospitals, as a rule, supported and endowed by Jews, throw open their doors to sufferers irrespective of creed, color or nationality. Other instances could be cited of charities, not medical, organ ized along similar lines. The Jewish free em ployment bureaus of New York make no dis tinction with its applicants. The Educational Alliance and other Jewish social centres in the same city offer their clubs and classes to the Jew and Gentile alike. Jewish agencies, giving material relief, or to use a better term, those which care for the needy in their own homes, in the main confine their work to beneficiaries of their own faith, without, however, making any rigid distinction. On the other hand, the trend of Jewish charity has been in the direction of caring for the Jewish poor, solely through Jewish agencies, and without the intervention or co-operation of other sectarian or non-sectarian societies or institutions.
The problem of the Jewish charitable so cieties of the United States to-day is the prob lem of the care of the immigrant. As such, it passes beyond merely local lines. In some of its manifestations it is national in character and in a few it has an international significance.
The fact that the large bulk of the needy Jews in the United States reside in New York is accidental, and concerns the Jews of Denver and San Francisco equally with those of the Eastern seaboard cities. Insofar the problem is a national one. Moreover, to deal intelli gently with the question requires a knowledge of the immigrant's antecedents, the impelling motive which brought him to the United States and an acquaintance with his previous environ ment. And here the international phase of the question comes in. Roughly speaking, it may be said that there are no American-born Jewish poor. Of the 9,274 families who applied for assistance to the United Hebrew Charities of New York. during the year ending 30 Sept. 1915, 2 per cent were born in the United States. And of these the majority of heads of families were of the first generation. Jewish dependents who have an ancestry in the United States of more than two generations are practically un known. It must not be concluded, however, that Jewish immigrants become dependent on their arrival. In 1915 only 13.59 per cent of applicants at the United Hebrew Charities of New York were in this country less than five years.
In the year 1881 began that great wave of emigration from eastern Europe, the end of which is not yet. Driven by a relentless pefse cution, which endangered not only their homes but frequently their lives, thousands of Jews were compelled to flee from their homes to seek new residence on these shores. The Russo Jewish committee which originally undertook the work of caring for these immigrants turned it over very shortly to the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, which came into existence in De cember 1881. In one year this society spent $250,000, $50,000 less than had been spent by the United Hebrew Charities of New York in the seven years of its existence. In the first and only annual report of the Emigrant Aid Society its president outlined as tersely as pos sible the efforts that had been made to provide homes and occupations for the thousands of fleeing exiles who reached these shores during the momentous summer of 1882. In the month of July the committee spent for board and lodging alone over $11,700.