Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services

United Hebrew Charities was formed in 1874 in New York City to organize relief and charitable work for the many social service organizations across the city,[7] serving New York’s Jewish community and acting as a central relief organization for Jewish charities in the area.[8]

At the time, movements towards overseeing charitable organizations were widespread in New York City. Josephine Shaw Lowell, part of the State Board of Charities of New York, crafted a report that later formed the Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, the first attempt at bringing together charitable efforts through a singular board’s supervision.[9]

In 1926, United Hebrew Charities merged with the Jewish Social Service Association (JSSA), taking their name because of the stigma associated with the term “charity” and to better represent the organization’s focus on social work.

The Jewish Prisoners Aid Society began in 1893 as a group of concerned citizens interested in providing proper chaplains to state prisons and aid to needy families of Jewish prisoners around the New York City area in order to support religiously appropriate treatment for all Jewish people incarcerated at state and city levels and their families.

By 1902, JPAS became The New York Jewish Protectory and Aid Society to address increase in Jewish juvenile delinquency and incarceration,[10] and eventually merged with the New York Jewish Protectory and Aid Society in 1907.

The Jewish Board's Jewish Community Services program provides a religious support for mental health and social services,[11] including education on the opioid epidemic[12] and domestic violence,[13] to New York City's Jewish community.

To support the mental health of veterans in the NYC Area, many of whom avoided care because they felt there was a stigma around seeking help, The Jewish Board and the Bronx VA Medical Center worked toward creating family-focused mental health services for veterans and veteran families of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars living in the Bronx, NY. The program was then expanded to provide long-term care and access for veterans and families of veterans.[14]

The 100 Schools Project was started in 2016 in partnership with OneCity Health (NYC Health + Hospitals), Community Care of Brooklyn (Maimonides Medical Center), Bronx Health Access (Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center), and Bronx Partners for Healthy Communities (SBH Health System) to address gaps in children’s mental health resources. It connects middle and high schools in New York City with local community-based organizations[15] and trains teachers and staff basics of diagnostic and intervention methods to help support student’s mental and behavioral health.[16]

Former CEO Dr. Jerome Goldsmith, who also served on the Board of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, was one of the first to recognize the importance of mental health services for people with HIV/AIDS, and advocated to increase the availability of mental health care for those affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City.[17]

Bob Zielony, who directed of the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Education department of The Jewish Board for six-years, was involved with outreach to Jewish communities in the New York area to educate them on the immunodeficiency virus as well as ways to prevent transmission, occasionally using Jewish-centric themes like "pikuach nefesh, the obligation under Jewish law to save lives under any circumstances" as justification for safe sex practices.[18]

In 2018, The Jewish Board acquired The Alpha Workshops,[19] which provides training in the decorative arts as a licensed school of design for LGBTQ+ adults and/or those living with HIV/AIDS and other disabilities.

In the late 1950s, Doctor Viola Bernard of Louise Wise Services, a prominent New York City Jewish adoption agency in the 1960s, created a policy to separate identical twins for adoption, with the intent that "early mothering would be less burdened and divided and the child’s developing individuality would be facilitated."[20]

In 1961, psychiatrist Peter B. Neubauer, then director of New York's Child Development Center, began a multi-year "nature versus nurture" twin study to observe how the separated siblings would fare in different environments. This involved at least five sets of identical twins and one set of triplets deliberately separated and placed into adoptive families by Louise Wise Services under Doctor Viola Bernard's policies.[21]

As a condition of the adoption, the parents agreed to in-person visits of up to four times a year by the study's research team, where the children would be observed, questioned, tested and/or filmed, without knowing the true nature of the study.[22] The parents of the adopted children were also not informed by Louise Wise Services that they were part of a twin or triplet set, and one biological mother to a set of twins separated by Bernard and studied by Neubauer reported that Louise Wise Services did not inform her that her children would be separated. Ultimately, one of separated siblings committed suicide.[23] Some have drawn ethical comparisons with the notorious twin experiments by the same Nazi regime that Neubauer himself had escaped,[24] while others have commented that the study was ethically defensible by the standards of the time.[25]

Dr. Neubauer's study was never completed, and in 1978, the Jewish Board of Guardians merged with Jewish Family Services to form the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services.[26] The study records are currently in the custody of Yale University under seal until October 25, 2065, and cannot be released to the public without authorization from The Jewish Board,[27] while Louse Wise Services' adoption records are held by Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children.[28]

In 2011, two identical twins who reunited as adults, Doug Rausch and Howard Burack, sent a letter to The Jewish Board requesting to see their records. The Jewish Board initially denied that Rausch and Burack had been part of the study, until the brothers were able to produce archived notes from one of Dr. Neubauer's former research assistants proving that they were indeed part of the study.[29] The Jewish Board says Dr. Neubauer's study records are sealed to the public until 2065 to protect the privacy of those studied. To this date, all study subjects who have requested their personal records have received them, albeit heavily redacted and inconclusive.[30]

The Neubauer study was the subject of the memoir Identical Strangers (2007)[31] and the documentary films The Twinning Reaction (2017)[32] and Three Identical Strangers (2018),[33][34] along with the television episode Secret Siblings (2018).[35]