ORT’s Training Booming as Economy Plummets

As the economy tanks, business is booming for ORT, the Jewish nonprofit that runs schools and training centers in the United States, Israel and 61 other countries.

Although now marking 129 years since its 1880 founding in St. Petersburg, Russia, the global organization is not your father’s/mother’s ORT and certainly not your great-grandparents’ ORT.

That’s the message from ORT America’s annual meeting held March 1-2 at a Santa Monica hotel bordering the Pacific and attended by some 250 international and national leaders and California supporters, as well as by Larry King and actor Ed Asner.

Only the most assiduous historians know what the letters ORT stand for, but they are the acronym for the original Russian name, roughly translated as the Society for the Promotion of Handicrafts and Agricultural Labor (for Jews).

The first students, moving from the shtetls of the Pale to the Russian cities of the late 19th century, learned such useful trades as shoemaking and carpentry. Later, immigrants to the New World were taught corset-making and other needle trades.

In the post-World War II decades, high-tech classes in computers and information technology topped the curriculum. In 2009, however, with pink-slipped white- and blue-collar workers joining new high school graduates in looking for jobs likely to afford some long-range security, two new trends are developing.

“In this country, the most popular courses are now in the health care field, particularly for nursing and pharmacy jobs,” said Ephraim Buhks, director of U.S. ORT operations, in an interview.

In Israel, the United States, Europe and developing countries, the uncertain economy is filling ORT’s training and retraining classes to the bursting point, reported Robert Singer, director general and CEO of World ORT headquartered in London.

By countries, Israel has the largest ORT student population, followed by the East European nations of the former Soviet Union.

Globally, ORT currently trains some 250,000 students and has roughly an equal number of members. This year’s budget runs to $300 million, of which 80 percent comes from the governments of the 63 countries in which ORT operates and 20 percent from member support. Equivalent figures for the United States are 50,000 to 60,000 members in 300 chapters, while student enrollment stands at about 3,000.

By its philosophy, and as a condition of governmental support, ORT is nonsectarian. With Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union and Iran largely in the past, and a massive Latino and Asian influx to major American cities, the ethnic demographics at ORT schools are shifting.

Buhks estimated that in the United States, Jews constitute from 25 percent to 75 percent of the enrollment in ORT classes, depending upon the subject and location.

At the Los Angeles ORT Technical Institute on Wilshire Boulevard in mid-city, some 500 students — second to New York’s 1,000 students — are evenly split between Jewish and non-Jewish students. English-as-a-second-language classes are among the best attended. There is also a smaller satellite facility in Van Nuys.

In New York, ORT has now joined hands with Chabad in offering technical classes to former yeshiva students who have decided not to follow a strict, full-time religious life, Buhks said. Talks are under way for a similar collaboration in Los Angeles, as well as for training young Orthodox women in New York.

In Miami, Detroit and Los Angeles, ORT has established partnerships with day schools and bureaus of Jewish education.

Last Sunday’s annual dinner gala at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel held some historical significance as the first joint gender-integrated summit meeting of the women’s and men’s ORT wings, which merged in 2007 to form ORT America.

Highlights included Asner conferring the 2009 Tikkun Olam Award on Dr. Sam Goetz, an optometrist and longtime leader of the 1939 Club in Los Angeles, who initiated the club’s chair in Holocaust studies at UCLA.

Goetz, a concentration camp inmate liberated at age 16, movingly recounted his two years in a displaced persons camp in Italy, where ORT classes “provided us with basic skills and hope at a time when hope was a very precious commodity.”

TV’s Larry King moderated a discussion among five Israeli and American panelists on ORT’s role in Israeli education. In appreciation, he received a pair of ORT suspenders.

ORT is doing something about the perennial Jewish organizational problem of attracting young people through its Next Generation affiliate. The program’s Los Angeles leader, Deena Eberly of Beverly Hills, said her group numbers about 200, whose ages range from 25-40.

Like others among her contemporaries, Eberly came to ORT through the examples of her family. “Both my father and grandfather were active in ORT here, and my great-grandfather probably was a member in Russia,” she said, “So it was natural for me to join.”

The evening’s proceedings were conducted by meeting chair Judi Lieberman of Thousand Oaks and national President Doreen Hermelin of Detroit.