Keeping a close eye on her “children,” Adele Harper gently eases herself onto a couch in her tidy studio apartment. Without giving her a chance to get settled, Harper’s three little ones — a dog named Reno and two cats, Nermal and Puss Puss — run to join her.
It’s a scenario that will be repeated countless times throughout the day, and one that 69-year-old Harper, who three years ago was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given just three months to live, is grateful for.
“They’re what keep me going. If I died, who would look after them?” asks the San Francisco resident, affectionately stroking Reno’s ear.
Her home is adorned with paintings of cats and dogs. On the floor next to her bed, she has carefully placed three small pillows for her animals to sleep on.
Being able to live at home and look after her pets is something Harper does not take for granted. Before contacting the Jewish Family & Children’s Services home support program for seniors, Harper could barely make it through each day, let alone care for her animals.
The home support services program, funded by a $95,000 grant from the Maimonides Fund of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s Endowment Fund, offers professional care to low-income older Jewish adults living in San Francisco and the Peninsula.
Trained home health aides provide some 600 Jewish seniors with a range of services including personal care, transportation, housework, shopping, meal preparation, counseling and companionship. Such assistance enables frail seniors like Harper to avoid institutionalization and remain safely at home.
Without the program, Harper, who moved to California from New York seven years ago to be with her daughter (who has since passed away), says she doesn’t know what she would have done.
“I really don’t. It came at a point when I had just lost my daughter, was sick myself, had no one to talk to, and was feeling suicidal.”
“Advancing age…illness…accidents…all can leave seniors accustomed to an independent lifestyle in sudden need of assistance,” says John Blumlein, who chaired the Maimonides Fund’s advisory committee when the JFCS grant was awarded.
There are at least 25,000 elderly in the San Francisco and Peninsula Jewish community, and the 85-plus population is growing three times as fast as the population as a whole, reports Amy Rassen, JFCS associate executive director.
While the majority of program clients qualify for MediCal, they do not receive coverage for home care. Consequently, at least 30 percent of program clients require financial aid.
Calling it a “mitzvah to care for the elderly,” Don Friend, a member of the Maimonides Fund’s advisory committee, recently visited Harper at her Sunset District home.
He sat with her on the couch, listening as she spoke of the kosher nutrition and transportation programs she uses and “the sweet girl who comes to clean every Monday.” Harper also recalled her first trip to Israel, taken shortly after she discovered she was ill and “thought it would be the last trip I’d ever make.”
These days, Harper says she is concerned with the quality of her life. To that end, she has stopped her chemotherapy treatments (“Doctors should get rid of chemo and give everybody animals,” she asserts) and has made friends with the neighbor across the hall, adding, “We have dinner together most every night.
“I may be living on borrowed time,” says Harper, pausing as Reno and Puss Puss vie for attention, “but I intend to make the most of it.”
The Maimonides grant to the JFCS was one of four totaling $234,000 recently allocated to local agencies providing assistance to needy and infirm Jewish seniors. Other Maimonides grants approved by the JCF’s board of directors were:
*$77,500 to the Jewish Home for the Aged’s Adult Day Care Center, the only program in San Francisco offering medical and therapeutic care to the chronically ill in a Jewish setting.
*$38,500 to Mount Zion Health Systems, Inc. for its adult health center, which serves frail elderly and seeks to prevent premature institutionalization and social isolation. The center is open to people in the neighboring community, many of them emigres.
*$23,000 to the Montefiore Senior Center’s program for frail seniors. Operating out of both the S.F. Jewish Community Center and Congregation B’nai Emunah, the program features socialization and exercise activities along with holiday celebrations.