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The S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children's Services and Catholic Charities separately have logged many years of social service in an effort to solve some of the Bay Area's grittiest welfare problems.

Somewhere between San Francisco and the Holy Land, they discovered that their social philosophies are not so far apart.

When members of the two agencies — 16 in all — traveled to Israel together several weeks ago, they experienced a first-hand recognition of the shared religious traditions that underscore their commitment to caring for the downtrodden, including elders, victims of domestic violence and abused children.

"We got to know each other and each agency better. We both came back [from Israel] with some ideas of what can be done within our own organizations," said Brian Swift, a Catholic Charities board member.

After the troupe landed at an old bomb shelter-turned-domestic violence shelter in Kiryat Shmona, Swift realized Americans and Israelis could help each other professionally by collaborating on the fine-tuning of their programs.

In Israel, they discovered, laws had only recently been enacted to protect women from their batterers. But the laws were not being enforced and financial support for the new center has been scarce.

Yet despite the newness of the program, both men and women were coming to the shelter voluntarily to seek counseling for domestic abuse. Up to 40 percent of them were the batterers themselves — a far higher percentage of men who cooperate without a court order than in the United States, Swift said.

The Israelis, likewise, were full of questions about American domestic violence programs and promised to write and to visit both Bay Area social service agencies.

"We're better at the domestic violence project than the Israelis, but when we learned how they receive new immigrants and work with their seniors, we [saw that we] have a lot to learn," said Rita Semel, the group's leader and vice president of the S.F.-based JFCS.

The group's cross-religious tour of the Holy Land reinforced its purpose there: to bridge culture and religion to strengthen their professional relationship and learn what Israeli social workers could teach them.

Just outside Jerusalem, the group visited a neighborhood where Israelis had hired a local man to act as an abba (father) and look after seniors living alone.

The seniors wear an electronic device on their wrists that can page the father if they should suddenly need help. The seniors cover 75 percent of the program's cost, paying $500 to start the service and $25 a month to continue it. The government subsidizes the rest.

The beauty of the program, Swift said, is that it runs with the idea that "the longer the elderly live in their own homes, the better off they are."

The father program has been so successful, it is being duplicated in neighborhoods throughout the country. Swift and JFCS board member Norma Satten felt certain that a similar program also could work here.

The Americans were equally impressed by the Israeli alternative to foster care.

Rather than place kids with foster families, Israeli foster families are placed with the kids at a residential center outside Tel Aviv. There, each family lives with up to nine children who have been removed from abusive families.

Swift noted that the center's 240 kids, ages 5 to 14, were "remarkably happy."

The kids discover that normal fathers don't beat their children, which has a strong psychological impact, he said.

"The difference is that the families are physically there and can be supervised by the system," while, in the United States, "foster families get institutional visits at best."

The Americans were in awe of how well Israelis assimilate their immigrants by teaching them Hebrew and finding them housing and jobs. However, that good impression dissipated somewhat when they noticed a huge disparity between the treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.

"It's not against the law to discriminate there. It was interesting to talk to Palestinian and Arab residents about it," Swift said.

"What you walk away with is that for these issues to be resolved, you need to have more economic parity between the two [societies]."

Satten noted that JFCS and Catholic Charities also gained a better understanding of each other by sharing experiences in a land holy to both faiths.

"When I saw the emotion and feeling on the face of one of the Catholic women when she first saw the place where Jesus and Mary lay in the crêche brought up to me all the places in Israel that have importance to [non-Jews]," Satten said.

The JFCS and Catholic Charities in coming weeks and months will be working together to improve, and perhaps link, their welfare services to help immigrants, victims of domestic violence, the homeless and AIDS sufferers.

"Certainly," Swift said, "nothing but good can come of that."