72 LEE K. FRANKEL 



.ation residing in the so-called Ghetto of our large cities has 

 not fallen victims to the vices and diseases which breed there. 

 The concern of the thinking Jew lies in the fact that the per- 

 centage of Jewish vice and crime and disease as found to-day 

 in our large cities, small as it may be, is nevertheless distinctly 

 larger than statistics show to have been the case heretofore. 

 To the student of affairs, there is a menace in a condition of 

 things which on its face shows such dangerous possibilities. 

 Referring to New York in particular, it cannot be denied that 

 the city, through its geographical position, has peculiar limita- 

 tions with respect to population which cannot be overstepped 

 without a serious injury to the community. As a matter of 

 fact, certain sections of the city, particularly those in which 

 the poorer elements of the population live, have long since 

 passed the boundaries of normal housing, and there has resulted 

 a harvest of poverty and vice, crime and disease which are 

 the adjuncts of such abnormal congestion. 



So far as the Jews are concerned, nothing could be more 

 indicative of these conditions than the amount of so-called 

 juvenile delinquency. In the house of refuge on Randall's 

 island, there are over 200 Jewish boys and girls. In the juve- 

 nile asylum there are 230 Jewish children under sixteen years 

 of age committed for various misdemeanors. Compared with 

 the entire Jewish population of the city, the number is in- 

 significant, and the ratio will probably be found to be consider- 

 ably lower than that of the general population. To the Jew- 

 ish philanthropist and sociologist, there is cause for alarm 

 in these figures, because he sees that the crowded life of the 

 streets, the lack of playgrounds and breathing spots, the ab- 

 sence of proper home surroimdings, have injurious effects on 

 the Jewish child, to whom the simplest legal misdemeanors 

 were in the past unknown. And what is true of the child is 

 true of the adult. Whatever parasitic poverty may exist 

 among the Jews in the United States and in particular in 

 New York, whatever percentage of criminals and vicious 

 persons may have developed, the results are in the main due 

 to the overcrowding and congestion, to which their poverty 

 has subjected them. 



How can an increase of these evils be averted? The 



