Leonard Fein, founder of the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy, marked the San Francisco chapter’s inauguration Tuesday night by uttering an age-old Jewish lament.
“Why us?” Fein asked the audience at Congregation Sherith Israel. “Why the Jews?”
The question was followed by statistics about a national problem that he was calling on Jews to help solve: More than 75 percent of welfare recipients are illiterate, 21 million American can’t read at all and one in five high school graduates cannot read their own diplomas.
Fein then answered his own question.
“We who have experienced more sharply perhaps than anyone what it feels like to have the back of all of our neighbors turned against us,” Fein said, “should never be the ones turning their backs.”
He added that the Jewish spirit of tikkun olam, or repairing the world, coupled with Judaism’s rich legacy of learning, creates a natural forum for a literacy program. It also helps break down barriers between ethnic, religious and income groups.
The local chapter is a joint project of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and the Jewish Community Relations Council.
Fein hopes that San Francisco Jews can emulate the success of the program in other parts of the country.
In Boston, for example, eighth-graders at Solomon Schechter Day School, where tuition is close to $10,000 a year, tutor second-graders at the Shaw School, where the average household income is around $8,500 a year.
“It’s hard to say whether the impact of the interaction is greater on the children or on their tutors,” said Fein, who is also director of the Reform movement’s Commission on Social Action, founder and former editor of Moment magazine, and founder of Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger.
He drew the biggest laugh of the evening when he recalled that after pledging 100,000 Jewish volunteers for President Clinton’s nascent literacy program, he received a call from Richard Riley, the secretary of education.
“I can’t wait to tell the Methodists,” Riley told him.
For Natalie Berg, the JCRC’s secretary and chair of Tuesday’s event, the reasons for the literacy program were multidimensional.
“First of all, I’m a firm believer in education and secondly, I’m the grandmother of nine grandchildren,” she said.
“Education is ingrained in Jewish families and culture. Both of my parents came to this country unable to speak English, and with little formal education. My parents placed a high premium on education, and consequently, each of their four children earned graduate degrees.”
In addition, she said, “Illiteracy breeds hatred. The people who are the most ignorant are the ones who are the most prejudiced and the most hateful. Look at the people committing hate crimes. Most of them are lucky if they’ve had a high school education.”
Marvi Hagopian attended the kickoff with her son Robert to fulfill a personal pledge: If her son conquered dyslexia, she vowed to become a literacy activist. Robert Hagopian couldn’t read until he was 13 and endured years of being branded as a delinquent and underachiever.
“As a mother you want the best for your children, and when you’re told that your child is expected to be a high-school dropout, you take a stand and fight,” Marvi said.
She disregarded the advice of teachers, counselors and psychologists, enrolling her son in a literacy program geared toward students with learning disabilities.
Robert Hagopian graduated last spring with a degree from U.C. Santa Barbara and is hoping to become an art professor. And his mother has been a staunch advocate of literacy for the past five years.
One of the evening’s closing speakers, Mayor Willie Brown, painted a vivid picture of the perils of illiteracy.
“The cornerstone of my success has been appetite for information, satisfied by constant reading,” Brown said. “It gave me the opportunity to develop a great vocabulary and to have a reference point on almost any subject.”
But sometimes the mayor lacks answers. While visiting a local elementary school, he said, a 6-year-old asked him when Muni was going to be fixed.
“Now that kid needs some tutoring,” Brown joked.