Between the cracks
Friends of a disabled Newark man turn to Jewish agencies for assistance

by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

Albert Brandmaster washes his hands fastidiously in the sink across the hall from his one-room apartment on Grant Street in Newark. A faint smell of decay and sweat scents the air of the brownstone, which is all he can afford on his $520 monthly disability check.

Just inside the front door is a handwritten sign that reads, “Cleanleeness is next to Godleeness.” On the wall outside his door are the handwritten words “Fire Department wants this area clear.”

Brandmaster folds the paper towel he has used and carefully places it, along with the soap, back into one of the eight shopping bags he keeps just outside his door. Asked what he keeps inside them, he says only, “I carry stuff in here.”

Before joining a visitor on the stoop for an interview, he is busy for a long time arranging and rearranging his possessions, including the umbrellas he keeps in a row on an old chifforobe, which together with an aluminum table against the wall and a small bed are his only furniture. Jackets hang across the wall, and the bed is piled with neatly folded possessions. A black rotary phone, covered with dust, sits on the table. On the floor are boxes of teabags, SOS pads, cleanser. He gently picks up some tattered newspapers and moves them about a quarter-inch. He saves them “just in case I need them.”

Brandmaster has no kitchen, no stove, no place to cook. At 55 he looks more like 65, with wisps of gray hair and an aging body. He has no family and no friends but can recite the dates or random details of traumas in his life, from the day his mother left him to the social worker who tried to help him. “April 18, 1971, Shirley did walk out and leave you flat. I’ve had enough.”

Listening to him for a while helps a visitor pick up on the internal logic of his monologue, sprinkled with Yiddishisms probably learned in his childhood. Soon he will mention the social worker at the welfare office. “Glasses, dress, landsman wait in the chair. Sit here. I will talk to my supervisor.”

He mentions the murder of his grandmother Tillie in April 1956, the older brother “I never looked at” because he was taken away as a baby by his grandfather Abie before Albert was even born. All he says about his father is, “He’s a schikker, drink himself to death.” Talk to Brandmaster about taking the bus, he will tell you about putting the gelt in and then the Yiddish diminishes to undistinguishable phrases of “zth shmatelateh.” Phrases from erev Shabbos to boker tov are muttered almost as a reflex. There seems to be an emotional link between the things he says; for a visitor, they are hard to connect. But he is welcoming and willing to chat with anyone who may be able to help him.

But helping Albert Brandmaster — who has managed, despite his obvious mental disabilities, to live on his own in Newark since the day his mother left him when he was 21 — is no easy task. And according to the social worker who has taken him under her wing for the past 15 years, a combination of Albert’s erratic behavior and a non-profit sector that has not yet developed services for people like him suggest that the task is getting no easier.

The Good Samaritan

“The American public is so focused on ‘survivor’ shows. Here’s a survivor, someone who has survived on his own on a measly check from social security,” said Carol Endl, a social worker at JESPY House Inc. in South Orange, a center for people with developmental disabilities affiliated with the MetroWest Jewish community. “Talk about making money stretch and living in a situation that is unsafe and unsavory. He’s a survivor.”

Endl has been helping Brandmaster on her own and through her church for the last 15 years. Brandmaster is not among JESPY’s clients, but Endl and fellow parishioners of the House of Prayer, a historic Episcopalian/Anglican church just down the block from Brandmaster’s home, have provided support simply because he has none.

“I think something as simple as living in a safe place and enjoying yourself is something we should all have access to,” she said. “That he can’t do that, that he can’t sit down and make himself a cup of tea without wondering what’s going on outside his door, makes me crazy.” Endl said she believes he has obsessive-compulsive disorder and is “probably mentally retarded.”

Ever since he “appeared at the church” one Sunday, Endl has handed Brandmaster extra dollars, brought him food and a mattress, contacted housing authorities, and tried to help him, setting up appointments for him with social service agencies. “He gets in his own way,” she told NJ Jewish News. He often misses appointments (indeed, Endl and a visitor had to drop by his home unannounced and early in the morning, before the time he typically leaves for the day). At one point, she and other parishioners found him an apartment on the 12th floor of a senior citizens building; but it turned out he was scared of heights and declined the offer.

“What he really needs is to be in a supervised group home environment,” she said. But he doesn’t have the money for JESPY House, which Endl said can cost $800 a month for rent; with his inability to keep appointments, he hasn’t been able to take advantage of other agencies that might help him.

But Endl is still trying to find help for Brandmaster within the Jewish community. She told NJJN that over the last few years she has contacted a number of agencies, beginning with Jewish Family Service of MetroWest. JFS, she said, was originally ready to help until they checked their files and found that they had already tried. According to Endl, the intake social worker indicated that Brandmaster needed to agree to see a doctor and take medication as a precondition for receiving service. Endl acknowledged that Brandmaster has refused to take medication.

In conversation with NJJN, Sheila Muster, JFS director of operations, would neither confirm nor deny any interaction with Brandmaster or Endl, citing confidentiality laws. She did say, however, “We always respond to intake, and we do whatever we can to help.”

Endl said she wrote a letter to the then executive director of the Jewish Community Housing Corporation, but received no reply. Harold Colton-Max, now JCHC executive director, told NJJN he could find no record of the letter from Endl. Had one been received, he said, a response would have been sent. “We never leave a request unresponded to. It would be unprofessional. That’s not how we treat people.”

In any case, it turns out that Brandmaster is not eligible for services from JCHC, which provides housing only for people age 62 and over. Still, said Colton-Max, “we would have referred him to one of the other agencies that could work with him.”

Endl has grown more and more frustrated. “Come on. I’m going to the Jewish community to help someone who’s Jewish, who’s coming to an Episcopal church to use the kitchen to cook matza because it’s Passover!... No one wants to help. What am I supposed to do?”

In fact, several agency directors tacitly acknowledged that more needs to be done to help people with special needs, particularly the mentally ill.

Endl said she contacted several rabbis, including Rabbi Samuel Bogomilsky at Mount Sinai Congregation in the Ivy Hill section of Newark, who said he would try to help. “Even an apartment in Ivy Hill is better than where he is now,” she said. Bogomilsky recalled the conversation with Endl and told NJJN that he is willing to help once Brandmaster is living at Ivy Hill. He added, however, that he felt Brandmaster would be better off in a supervised group home environment.

The one Jewish community group that has embraced Brandmaster are residents of JESPY House. Clients participating in the social action club, begun at JESPY House in October 2004, have voted to take him on as one of their mitzva projects. (The residents have also sent phone cards to soldiers in Iraq and offered aid to a single mother in a shelter, among other projects.)

“Basically, we want to try to help him. We want him to have a lot of things that everyone else has,” said Sarah Locker, one of the club’s 14 members. They have raised money on his behalf and purchased clothing and food for him. As David Finkelstein said, “We got stuff for Albert from ShopRite.” They’ve also been able to supply him with a coat, hat, gloves, even cash toward his rent.

Two members of the group sent him an invitation to their Passover seder this year, which he accepted. “April 21, 2005. It was alright. It was okay. I came too early in the afternoon,” Brandmaster said with a smile.

What Brandmaster wants most of all, however, is to find a better place to live. “I’d like to live somewhere,” he said. He calls Endl, often leaving messages begging her to help him find a new place to live, she said.

But for today, Grant Street in Newark is home, and after the visitors depart, he heads down the street, plastic shopping bags in hand. What will he do today? He doesn’t know. “I’ll go for a walk. I’ll wet myself [shower]; I’ll shave myself.”

Johanna Ginsberg can be reached at jginsberg@njjewishnews.com.