Decline Is Everywhere

I almost linked to an article in the Herkimer NY paper about a meeting on the closing of the Herkimer office. But I'm tired of the stories, as important as they are for the people affected. Other things arouse emotion as well--including the timing of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the place, as described in this NYTimes article today. (They picked a date that happens to be Yom Kippur.)

But decline is also found among other organizations than FSA--this piece from the Jewish Forward describes the decline in Buffalo:

In the recent decades since advances in technology and competition from abroad sounded the death knell for the industries that provided employment for the Rust Belt states of the Northeast and the Midwest, states that have lost major parts of their population to the Sun Belt, once-thriving Jewish communities in those regions have seen thousands of members head south and west. The Northeast and Midwest, where 80 percent of American Jewry lived as recently as 1960, now is home to barely half of American Jews, according to the latest National Jewish Population Survey.

For JCCs, synagogues and other communal institutions, this drop in members and in income has meant drastic, often painful, belt-tightening measures: mergers, downsizings and property sales and closures.

“The local Jewish community,” a front-page article in The Buffalo News states, “is adjusting to dramatically reduced numbers.” That means less money for Jewish federation fundraising campaigns, fewer volunteers for synagogues and other organizations, and smaller enrollments in religious schools.

And just recently there was an article on the "Odd Fellows" a fraternal and charitable organization that's composed of old fogeys like me. It's the nature of society to have this ebb--not that it's any consolation to those being washed out by the tide.