Jobless Are Finding Places in Prayers

It was Yom Kippur, Judaism’s most holy day of the year, and the message from the pulpit at Congregation Kol Emeth in Silicon Valley last week included this startling and unusual appeal: Your fellow congregants need job leads.

At Congregation Beth Am, another synagogue in nearby Los Altos Hills, Rabbi Janet Marder’s sermon on the eve of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, included an urgent plea on behalf of a family in the congregation who desperately needed housing.

Two years ago, at the height of the high-tech boom, Silicon Valley’s houses of worship were focused on helping their congregants maintain moral values in light of unprecedented financial successes. Today, the mission is strikingly different.

“People would come to me and tell me about layoffs even before they were in financial distress. They were in emotional distress, absolute shock,” Marder said. “Then, as their job searches wore on, I began to be aware of the magnitude of what impact this was having on our families, financially as well as emotionally.”

“These are very highly educated, highly accomplished people. People who have never been unemployed before,” said Marder, who estimates the unemployment rate among her adult congregants at about 8%, on par with the figures for Santa Clara County. “This is about reevaluating our definition of success. The first question people get asked when they meet a stranger is, ‘What do you do?’ The perception is that you are judged by what you do, and that is not the Jewish way at all. You are judged by your character.”

For about a year, laypeople from the conservative synagogue Kol Emeth and its reform neighbor Congregation Beth Am have teamed up to provide networking opportunities, informational meetings and emotional support for unemployed members of the Jewish community. A similar group stemming from two congregations in Oakland started meeting in the East Bay in early May.

In addition to regular meetings at the two synagogues, there is an e-mail group for job leads and inquiries that has attracted about 350 members.

And at Calvary Church in Los Gatos, a Baptist congregation, the weekly job support group that began in November with eight people now draws 90 to 100 per meeting. The meetings include networking time, a guest speaker--and a recently added basket for prayer requests. One of the church’s lay leaders has offered to pray for anybody who is out of work.

“There are some people finding jobs, but every week we find there are a number of new people that come as well. It’s discouraging, but it’s good for them to come together,” said Calvary’s pastor, Lamar Allen.

Betty Fellows, 52, founded the group at Kol Emeth a year ago and maintains the popular e-mail job listings. She lost her software support job at a law firm in June 2001 when it was consolidated with another position at a different office. “The longest I’d ever been unemployed before is two months, and now it’s 15 months. It seems to be a different world at the moment,” she said.

Fellows was among the 25 job seekers who showed up on a recent Thursday night for a presentation by synagogue member David Meir Levi, a financial consultant, on health insurance alternatives for the unemployed.

Irene Lefton of Santa Clara makes a point of attending three networking events and an informational interview every week. She says she’s optimistic because a friend recently landed a job after Lefton helped her prepare for the interview. Now, she’s hoping her friend will use her new position to get Lefton’s resume into the right hands.

Jeff Gordon, who started the spinoff group at Temple Sinai in Oakland, said he turned to the synagogue because of his experience in the devastating Oakland Hills fire of 1991, in which Gordon’s family and 39 others in his congregation lost their homes.

“From that personal experience, I had seen and experienced the congregation come together in ways that enabled it to be a very valuable resource for many families who were going through very difficult times. It felt right that this would be another opportunity,” Gordon said.

Carol Holden Graber, 59, a single mother of two, said attending the meetings at her own synagogue, Congregation Beth Am, provides an extra level of comfort. “I think it’s helpful to have it be part of my synagogue because you feel like you can be more candid with people. You have more familiarity, a basis of understanding. It’s more of a family. If it were just a job group, it might not be that way.”

Graber, a systems analyst from Cupertino, had been in information technology for about 35 years. Although she was laid off once before in the early 1990s, she always found plenty of choices in her field. “I always had interviews. There were a lot of people interested in me, and now there’s nothing out there,” she said.

Rather than fight to land a job she no longer believes exists, Graber has been working as a substitute teacher and plans to pursue a master’s degree in special education. She has rented out rooms in her three-bedroom house and her finished garage, and even taken dog-walking jobs to make ends meet.

Congregation Beth Am’s president, Rick Rudman, says this is the worst economic situation he’s seen in his nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley. “What’s going on in our congregation right now with members of our community needs to be addressed,” he said.

After a year of informational sessions and informal networking, the group at Beth Am is now shifting its focus to bring unemployed congregants face to face with fellow synagogue members who might actually be in a position to help. Rudman, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, is hosting a reception for congregants this week to do just that.

“I think we’ve been really successful in giving people emotional and spiritual support, but I don’t think we’ve been as successful as we would have hoped in helping people find jobs,” said Cindy Anderson, a co-founder of the group at Beth Am and an unemployed mother of three in Los Altos. “I think the reality is there are very few jobs out there. It is really hard.”