JERUSALEM — Rachel Amshalom was living on the edge even before she lost her job as a teacher's assistant last summer.
Amshalom, the single mother of an 8-year-old daughter, said her monthly income subsidy from the Israeli government shrank from $300 to $75 in 2003 in the wake of sweeping welfare cutbacks. Amshalom said she also lost a small slice of her already minuscule child allowance, a benefit paid to all Israeli parents that has been scaled back.
When the on-again, off-again classroom job dried up too, she was adrift. Amshalom, 50, borrowed $1,800 to pay her bills and moved with her daughter to a cramped apartment in a public housing project in the working-class Katamon neighborhood. She gets potatoes, sugar, rice and other basics at a food bank and waits for the phone to ring with a job offer.
"I'm going backward, and I hope it stops -- somehow," Amshalom said.
Amshalom is among tens of thousands of Israelis whose welfare benefits have been cut as part of the conservative government's effort to save money and reduce dependency by nudging more people into the labor force. The changes are part of a wider economic overhaul under Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to trim government spending and privatize more functions.
Reform advocates say Israel is overdue in restructuring its increasingly expensive welfare system, which has a remarkably broad safety net born of the country's collectivist past, from health insurance and unemployment protection to paid parental leave. Echoing the U.S. debate over welfare reform, they argue that aid recipients stand a better chance of breaking out of poverty by working and that doing so will strengthen the society.
But critics charge that the cuts have been draconian. With unemployment surpassing 10%, they argue, job openings are too sparse to accommodate a big influx of workers. Many aid recipients have been unable to find jobs that are stable or pay enough to carry them above the poverty threshold of $1,000 a month for a family of four, advocates for the poor say.
"They're finding work two hours a day, four hours a day. They're finding themselves working but making less than they were with welfare benefits -- a dead end," said Barbara Epstein, who runs Community Advocacy, a storefront aid office.
The debate over cutting benefits has sharpened since a government report on poverty was released in November, showing that more than one in five Israelis, or 1.4 million people, were poor in 2003. That rate was 8% higher than a year earlier.
