South Philly Review

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“I’ve not been coming for long, but my heart is already here,” Estelle Goldstein said April 28 at the Jacob and Esther Stiffel Senior Center, 604 Porter St.

If fate maintains its tumultuous course, the heart of the resident of the 300 block of Daly Street will end up broken. Barring a mammoth economic assist, Goldstein and the other 449 individuals who depend on the 83-year-old facility for comforts such as kosher meals, exercise programs, day trips and discussion groups will need to seek them elsewhere.

Their amenities could become the victims of an economic shortfall, as the space faces a $200,000 operational deficit and requires $400,000 for repairs to its roof and boiler. Minus a serious sum, the location, which became a senior center in 1975, will likely close by July 31. Though that date represents an extension of the June 30 deadline the board at Northeast Philadelphia’s Raymond and Miriam Klein JCC, which runs Stiffel, set April 12 with an 11-1 vote, it strikes Goldstein as indicative of disrespect.

“They can’t displace us,” she said. “This center is the heartbeat of the community.”

That heartbeat started to become labored two years ago, when the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, Stiffel’s owner and a top funder, dissolved the JCCs of Greater Philadelphia, leaving the Klein JCC, the city’s largest senior center, as Stiffel’s administrator. Facing possible extinction itself, the Klein JCC opened talks about Stiffel’s future last summer.

Raechel Hammer, Klein and Stiffel JCCs’ vice president of strategic development and compliance, detailed the prospects for the building’s survival in a one-hour session that featured equal parts angst and courage. Nobody wishes for Stiffel to cease its services yet the stressing circumstances might prove too powerful, she said. The latter led attendees to divulge the alliterative components of their time at Stiffel that breed the most joy — convenience, companionship and kosher cooking.

“This center has taken on the identity of the neighborhood,” Hammer said, adding nobody has bought the space. “We want everyone to end up in the best situation. The [$435,000] budget, the deficit and the repairs are the issues, not the ethnic identity of the participants.”

Hammer noted numerous nearby centers could offset parting with Stiffel, including Fels South Philadelphia Community Center, 2407 S. Broad St.; Center City’s Philadelphia Senior Center; and the South Philadelphia Older Adult Center, 1430 E. Passyunk Ave. She offered the Klein JCC as a fourth possibility, but the center’s Jewish identity could not cause the crowd to capitulate. The Klein JCC would offer ParaTransit through SEPTA, but the one-hour distance between sites crippled notions of convenience and companionship, as complaints on the likelihood of losing friends over unwillingness to travel were the second most prominent gripes.

Nothing topped grumbling about removing a firm part of many participants’ lives — access to kosher meals.

“Those other places won’t provide kosher food,” Connie Felser, a five-year venturer to Stiffel and a resident of the 1200 block of South 11th Street, said of the centers, excluding the Klein JCC. “I could do without all of the programs here. We have to keep kosher.”

“Most of all, we need to stay open,” Rachel Garber, a resident of the 2400 block of South Sixth Street and a seven-year member and volunteer, added. “Entertaining the idea of closing is a horrible thing to do to all of us, but especially to the oldest among us, some of whom are old enough to be my parents.”

Just before a luncheon to recognize Stiffel’s 100 volunteers, Garber and the others learned they could join two committees, one a fundraising group and the other a transition body, which most saw as the center’s death knell. Reaching out to others for assistance for the once-Jewish dominated yet currently culturally diverse center and devising individual endowment projects constituted most of the response to Hammer’s distributing tablets for signatures. A meeting tomorrow with the Jewish Federation and the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging, Stiffel’s chief funder, will further address the committees’ roles.

“I am skeptical about the outcomes of those lists,” Garber, who tabbed herself a “rabble-rouser since the Vietnam War,” said. “If they close Stiffel, I will stop doing volunteer work for the federation.”

Garber also offered cynicism over the disparity in membership costs. For $30 a year, Stiffel’s members enjoy a plethora of activities and have access to an on-site nurse and a social worker. With two fitness centers, a basketball gym and a 400-seat theater, among other offerings, the Klein JCC offers numerous memberships starting at $25 a month.

“Way too costly for low-income residents,” she said, adding the closing would affect other neighborhood entities, such as the John H. Taggart School, 400 Porter St., whose students come to Stiffel for reading assistance.

The ceremony for Garber and her colleagues and the accompanying meal included further discussion of the morning’s news, yet camaraderie reigned supreme.

“Stiffel is much more fun than SPOAC,” Linda Andreola, a resident of the 2400 block of South Warnock Street, who has attended for many years, said of her preference for the Whitman center, which receives 150 new attendees each year. “I love line dancing and cabaret. These Jewish people know how to have fun.”

Andreola had to wait until the next day for cabaret, but music delighted the crowd after Hammer and director Susan Hoffman made their rounds.

Now assisting seniors ages 60 and older, Stiffel had no age restrictions from its opening until its refashioning into a senior center, Hammer said. A 1985 fire damaged the building, which received aid from the Stiffel family, leading to its current name. Signs in the dining hall tell the lineage of Jews in South Philly, noting the area contained the city’s largest settlement of Eastern European Jews during last century’s mass immigration.