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Stewart AinStaff Writer

Despite optimism that Congress would quickly pass legislation authorizing federal financial assistance to synagogues and other houses of

worship damaged by Superstorm Sandy, the bill is bot-tled up in the Senate after overwhelming passage in the House last February.

Supporters of the bill blame Sen. Tom Carper (D-De.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Secu-rity and Governmental Affairs, for refusing to bring it

before the committee.“He believes the bill is unconstitutional,” explained

Nathan Diament, executive director of Public Policy for the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center in Washington. “There are plenty of other folks who don’t think that is an issue. They had a debate on this in the House and the bill passed. We are perfectly comfortable having that debate, but Sen. Carper doesn’t want that debate to happen.”

A spokesman for Carper, Aaron Fobes, had no im-mediate comment.

David Pollock, associate executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in New York, said his organization had “worked very hard with a wide range of constitutional experts to recast the House bill so that it would pass constitutional muster.”

Richard Foltin, director of national and legislative affairs at the American Jewish Committee, agreed, al-though adding: “I don’t want to suggest it is cut and dry, but on balance it is a constitutional way to deal with this effort.”

He said the Senate bill would amend the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s statute to clarify that houses of worship are covered and that it would be up to FEMA to implement it.

Foltin pointed out that the AJC has been a “staunch advocate for the separation of church and state and is against funding going to houses of worship. However, what we are dealing with now is not a funding stream intended to promote religious activity or one that would be subject to the discretion of policy makers. We are dealing with what amounts to a form of social insur-ance as the community responds to a disaster that hits all parts of society. We are trying to hold all institutions harmless for the harm visited upon them.”

Foltin said this legislation would be similar to the AJC’s support of federal funding to strengthen religious institutions against a terrorist threat.

“This is not promoting religion,” he said. “The Sen-

Sandy Aid For Houses Of Worship StalledConstitutional concerns keeping measure from Senate vote.

Continued on page 37

Nathan Diament

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sionals hired by Jewish companies for two years. Broadly, the government wants to create 170,000 new jobs for Arab Israelis by 2020 on top of 130,000 expected to be generated by natural growth of the economy.

Michael Sarel, a chief economist at the Israeli Finance Ministry, painted the economic future for Israel in stark terms: even in an optimistic scenario in which there is a high degree of workforce inte-gration (what he called the “optimistic scenario”), social gaps between Arabs and Jews are projected to widen, albeit modestly, over the next 50 years.

If there is minimal integration, however, in-equality in Israel will grow so fast that Israel will be come the country in the world with the largest social gaps. Sarel also predicted that government subsidies will increase so much that Israel’s na-tional debt will more than double over the next five decades as a portion of GDP.

The obstacles to integration are many, and formi-dable. They range from improving elementary and secondary public school education in Arab munici-palities to boosting the number of Arabs attending universities in Israel.

Arab students at universities require additional preparatory courses to fill out core curricula before they start classes. Their language skills are often not strong enough. And they also require an extra layer of social support to ease the transition from Arab towns to Israel’s main cities, said Daoud Bashuti, a Tech-nion University mathematics professor who said that the percentage of Arab students at Israel’s MIT is 20 percent, up from 10 percent a decade ago, and that the dropout rate has been cut by nearly 75 percent.

“There is potential and there is a critical mass of students,” he said. “The problem is job placement. They don’t know how to apply for jobs.”

Once in the job market, Arabs need assistance in preparing resumes and even in help strengthening Hebrew-language conversational skills, said Jihad Awad, who oversees El Fanar, an employment cen-ter in the Galilee financed by the government and the Joint Distribution Committee.

On the sidelines of the conference were sev-eral of the 2 percent of Arab Israeli engineers employed in Israeli high-tech companies. They said that Arab youths see the success of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs and have the same aspira-tion. But there’s a gap in confidence and access to investments.

“If Jews think that the sky is the limit, Arabs al-ways see the ceiling,” said Assad Khamaisee, a di-rector of systems at Mellanox Technologies. “When you get a person who has an idea to conquer the world, they always run into financing problems.”

The Arab techies, however, said they were en-couraged by the conference and the push toward integration, saying “better late than never.” ■

ate bill explicitly carves out an exception so that there could be no funding for the sanctuary and other explicitly religious portions of the structure that were damaged.”

Pollock said there are “lots and lots of houses of worship that desperately need assistance to be able to come back to life after Sandy.

“This is a very unique case,” he said. “It is not that we are asking for regular government support for houses of worship. What we are saying is that if there is a disaster declared by the president, houses of wor-ship shall be treated the same as other non-profits that get FEMA assistance.”

Pollock said that the difficulties now being en-countered in the Senate are “not only constitutional issues but budget issues. … People are now criti-

cizing this as a blank check, which is very hard to overcome with today’s gridlock.”

Diament said there is no way to skirt Carper and as-sign the bill to a different committee.

“But there is another way to pass the legislation out-side of the committee,” he said. “The process is for the Senate to add it to another bill. … We are not going to give up; we are being persistent. We are confident that if the bill made it to the floor it would pass. It would be retroactive for Sandy and all future disasters.”

Asked about the cost for Superstorm Sandy, Dia-ment said it is “estimated that for the dozens of houses of worship it will cost $40 million to $45 million.” But he quickly pointed out that FEMA spent $70 million on the Coney Island Aquarium alone.

“So for half of that money houses of worship could be fixed,” Diament said. ■

Sandy Aid continued from page 8

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