Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts sees change of leadership, Maxine Stein retires, Rabbi James Greene succeeds

Maxine Stein is retiring as the chief executive officer since 2015 of Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts. Rabbi James Greene has been named to succeed her. (Don Treeger / The Republican)

The week of Jan. 23 was bittersweet for Maxine Stein.

It was her final one before retirement as chief executive officer of Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, a nonprofit perhaps best known for its decades-long resettlement of refugees in the Greater Springfield area.

In the last year alone, the human-service agency helped welcome and settle 545 people to Western Massachusetts, some from Ukraine brought here by the still-raging war and others from around the globe.

During Stein’s eight-year tenure, Jewish Family Service expanded both its services and workforce despite the challenges of the coronavirus disease pandemic and the dismantling of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program under the Trump Administration.

“I am proud of many things, and, in my heart, I am most proud of my team,” Stein said. “I am incredibly proud how we pivoted during COVID by getting our staff set up quickly on Zoom and WhatsApp to serve every single client remotely for at least a year without a beat missed, and teaching them how to Zoom, too.”

She added, “Our staff goes the extra mile every single day in the mission to take care of people and respect them both in our resettlement work as well as in the comprehensive work we do as an organization.”

Stein’s successor, Rabbi James Greene, has spent his career working for Jewish nonprofits that include the Jewish Community Center in Springfield.

Like Stein, his perspective of the agency is that it serves individuals of all backgrounds and not simply focused on Jewish issues and causes.

He calls its programs a “reflection of core values that recognize human dignity and justice for each person,” and said his initial priorities are “listening and learning.”

“The work that happens at Jewish Family Service is incredibly critical, and I want time to learn as much as I can,” said Greene. With his wife, Greene is raising two daughters and an assortment of animals on a small homestead just over the Connecticut line. “I want to talk to our stakeholders, connect with the community and learn about the impact our work is having in helping people to achieve fulfilling lives.”

Refugee resettlement is a “deeply held American value” that can present challenges in a community, according to Greene. But, he added, “time over time” it shown to “have tremendous positive benefit.”

“It is a benefit to American culture and society to be engaged in welcoming people to our country,” said Greene who grew up in a military family and has lived around the world. “In the Jewish community we have in our historical memory an understanding of what it is like to be a stranger in a new place. This has been part of our ancestors’ journey.”

Stein estimates that Jewish Family Service has resettled in recent months at least 100 Haitians, more than 200 Afghans and over 250 Ukrainians, some with family and other connections in the West Springfield and Westfield area.

Ronnie Leavitt, right, sponsors the Timori family from Afghanistan, including father Sharafuddin and two of his children, the older boy Ramin and his younger brother, Sorosh. A member of Springfield's Sinai Temple, the sponsorship was arranged through Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts.

The agency has, as a result, added case managers as needed to serve those fleeing war and civil unrest to provide guidance in the languages they speak.

“We move in our resettlement work within humanitarian crises with three in the last year – the Afghan crisis, the Ukrainian crisis and the Haitian crisis – and with the refugees who have been sitting in camps for several years waiting to come to America,” Stein said.

Before joining Jewish Family Service in 2015, Stein was executive director of a hospice program in the upper Pioneer Valley.

“Coming to Jewish Family Service was the best vocational decision I ever made, and I consider most of my decisions fairly sound,” said Stein, a Berkshire County native who has lived in different parts of the country. “Its comprehensive aspect presented the opportunity to really grow even though I didn’t consider that coming in and while I may have been the public face of (the agency) and a conduit, its talented group of people really propelled us forward.”

Stein credits her team with strengthening the agency’s relationship with the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts to help secure funds from the foundation’s competitive grantmaking programs.

Services within the New Americans program that resettles refugees and assists with long-term integration have expanded to the point that the agency opened a satellite office in Stein’s hometown of Pittsfield.

In the wake of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021, she said, the agency was able to quickly assemble, with the help of a volunteer with a legal immigration background, a team of about 18 pro bono attorneys to assist the Afghan refugees arriving in Western Massachusetts.

“The government was initially unclear what benefits the Afghans, who arrived in the country with nothing, would receive, but we knew they would have one year to apply for asylum from the time they set foot in the U.S.,” said Stein who holds a master’s degree in social work and has had a long career in directing nonprofits. “We knew we had to scramble and, after consulting with immigration attorneys in our area, we created our own legal team. The attorneys, led by our volunteer, work under an immigration lawyer we hired and have received intensive training for this project that now has spilled over into helping the Ukrainians and Haitians.”

Syonara Tomoum, an Egyptian-born scholar and UMass-doctoral student who has taught Arabic in the Five-College system, is adult and youth education coordinator at Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts. She works on a literacy program for Afghan mothers resettled in the region with the agency's help. (THE REPUBLICAN FILE PHOTO)

Refugee resettlement is its largest program and is done in partnership with HIAS, the Maryland-based nonprofit formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that is regarded as the world’s oldest refugee agency.

There are an additional range of “impactful” programming, some with other Jewish organizations, and that no program is considered more important than another in its work.

Programs include providing social services to older adults in their homes, guardianship for individuals referred by the state and connections to financial resources for Jewish households living in economic distress as well as helping distribute kosher food items throughout the year to those who observe Jewish dietary laws.

Jewish Family Service has what Stein called a “very strong” behavioral health program and has applied to become a state-licensed clinic to allow clients, both refugees as well as individuals from the larger community, greater access to individual and family psychotherapy.

“We employ many multi-lingual and multi-cultural staff to be able to meet all the needs of our clients,” said Stein. The agency now has about 65 “mostly full-time” employees and is growing, she said.

Donor fund-raising is of “paramount importance,” Stein said. “It is a significant line in our budget,” she said. “We are fortunate to be the recipients of such generosity and this fund-raising allows us to educate our community about the type of work we do and how they can be helpful.”

The majority of the agency’s funding comes from grants, both program-specific awards and also some that are unrestricted for use.

Stein had special praise for Massachusetts for creating during the Afghan crisis what she called “basically an earmark to give all the resettlement agencies funding to cover rent, cash assistance, food, legal and operational expenses based on how many Afghans an agency was going to resettle.”

“This was of tremendous assistance for all of us doing resettlement work in Massachusetts as most states do not have that and a second allocation was also given,” said Stein of the state Legislature’s allocation of funding.

Stein is looking forward to retirement as a time to “find my way to some exciting things.”

“I’ve had such a tremendous bond with this work. It’s never felt like a job,” she said. “It’s also work that is likely never done as the world has so many crises that force people to leave their country, and now we have climate refugees in parts of the world.”

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