A Bite of the Big Apple

IT’Salways a pleasant surprise to discover new and important initiatives that sometimes hide under the radar even within our own relatively small frum world. That’s why I was so happy to learn of a program that, in its short three years of existence, has already given the gift of a parnassah b’kavod to over 700 frum Jews in New York City. When you think about it, that works out to another Yid landing gainful employment every 36 hours.

It’s called the Workforce Development Program (WDP), and it has enabled men and women of all ages, many of them with families to support but with no prior academic or employment credentials, to secure positions that generally pay salaries ranging anywhere from double the minimum wage to six figures.

WDP is run by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island (JCCGCI), a community services powerhouse led by Rabbi Moshe Wiener. For many years, JCCGCI has been operating an array of public and privately funded career services programs with an excellent record of job placements. But WDP is something new and very different: It’s the New York City municipal government that’s actually funding this program of culturally sensitive employment initiatives addressing the specific needs of Orthodox Jews, although it’s open, of course, to everyone, regardless of race and religion.

In a conversation with Rabbi Wiener to find out more about what seemed like an undiscovered gem of a program, I learned that WDP’s beginnings go back to a 2015 report commissioned by his agency. Authored by David Rubel, a public policy consultant with many years of experience in workforce development, it made a stark finding: Brooklyn’s frum and chassidic Jewish communities contain seven percent of the city’s young people living in low-income households, but very few employment-related municipal dollars were reaching those communities.