The document summarizes efforts to pass legislation authorizing federal financial assistance for houses of worship damaged by Superstorm Sandy, which has been stalled in the Senate. Specifically: 1) The bill passed the House but has been bottled up in the Senate committee by the chairman, Sen. Tom Carper, who believes it is unconstitutional to provide federal funding to religious institutions like synagogues. 2) Supporters argue the Senate bill has been crafted to address constitutional concerns by clarifying that FEMA can provide assistance and explicitly prohibiting funding for religious portions of damaged buildings. 3) Passing the legislation is urgent as many houses of worship damaged by Sandy desperately need repairs but the issue faces constitutional objections in

1. The Jewish Week ■ November 1, 2013
8
New York
Sandy Aid For Houses Of Worship Stalled
Constitutional concerns keeping measure from Senate vote.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
D
espite 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 bottled up in the Senate after overwhelming passage in the
House last February.
Supporters of the bill blame Sen. Tom Carper (DDe.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security 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 immediate 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, although 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 insurance 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-
Nathan Diament
Continued on page 37

2. Sandy Aid continued from page 8
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 worship shall be treated the same as other non-profits that
get FEMA assistance.”
Pollock said that the difficulties now being encountered 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 assign the bill to a different committee.
“But there is another way to pass the legislation outside 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, Diament 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. n
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37
The Jewish Week ■ November 1, 2013
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 integration (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, inequality 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 national debt will more than double over the next five
decades as a portion of GDP.
The obstacles to integration are many, and formidable. They range from improving elementary and
secondary public school education in Arab municipalities 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 Technion 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 center in the Galilee financed by the government and
the Joint Distribution Committee.
On the sidelines of the conference were several 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 aspiration. But there’s a gap in confidence and access
to investments.
“If Jews think that the sky is the limit, Arabs always see the ceiling,” said Assad Khamaisee, a director 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 encouraged by the conference and the push toward
integration, saying “better late than never.” n