ABSTRACT
The poverty among the poor Jews who live on New York's Lower East Side compares to poverty one has seen anywhere in America—in Mississippi, the South Bronx, East Los Angeles. Most people think of the Jewish immigration as the most spectacularly successful one in American history, but the 50-year journey from the shtetle to the Space Age left many casualties in its wake. Most of them are over 65, and many are Orthodox, but there are young people among them, too, and Jews with all shades of religious belief. There are only a few guards for the entire area, which stretches across several city blocks. As a moneysaving device, the city installed elevators that stop on every other floor, which means that heart patients, or arthritics, or people with Parkinson's disease, who live on odd floors must hobble down a flight of stairs in order to get home.
