Each household in Greater Cleveland’s Orthodox community will be asked to participate in a five- to 10-minute survey as part of a yearlong study aimed at pinpointing needs, identifying strengths and enhancing the strength of the community.
It will be led, designed and analyzed by and for members of the Orthodox community in Cleveland, and may also serve as a model of key patterns within Orthodox communities across the country.
The $15,000 study, funded by a grant from the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation and undertaken by Gesher Cleveland, will be designed to reach out by telephone or internet. Focus groups of two to three hours will meet virtually as part of the process, and key leaders in the community will be interviewed for 30 to 90 minutes as well.
As Orthodox families both grow and relocate to Cleveland – largely as a result of Ohio’s expanded school choice voucher program, which has bolstered enrollment in day schools – so have their needs.
“We’re thrilled to support Gesher’s efforts to align its service delivery method with documented community need,” Mitchell Balk, president of Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation, which awarded the study grant as part of a $113,670 two-year grant to Gesher, told the CJN. ”It’s important to us that all of our grantees are research based and data driven, but in this particular case, we’re thrilled that Gesher is drilling down on the specific needs of our growing Orthodox community in Cleveland.”
Agudath Israel of Ohio, based in Cleveland Heights, which advocates for Orthodox families and day schools, opened Gesher, its social service arm, in 2013 to respond to challenges. Yitz Frank, executive director of Agudath Israel, said Gesher offers a broad array of services to about 1,000 families, as well as seniors and women.
“There are a lot of really good initiatives out there, good ideas that people have to assist members of our community, and beyond, in a variety of different ways,” Frank told the CJN. “We obviously have a pretty good idea of where people are struggling and where they might need additional assistance and where philanthropic support should be targeted, but we don’t have any exact data.”
He said the survey will ask questions which differ from the Jewish Federation of Cleveland’s decade census and focus on different areas.
“This survey will strategically position us to assist our clients and provide data that will guide our programming for the future,” Gesher founder Rabbi Avrohom Adler stated in a news release announcing the survey.
An Orthodox endeavor
Hannah Lebovits will be lead researcher of the study. The Pittsburgh native, who grew up in Squirrel Hill attending Young Israel of Pittsburgh and was educated in Jewish day schools and college, lived in University Heights and attended Waxman Chabad Center in Beachwood from 2014 until two months ago. Formerly a graduate student at Cleveland State University, Lebovits relocated with her family to Dallas to take a position as an assistant professor of public administration and urban planning at the University of Texas at Arlington. There, she will teach qualitative research methods.
Lebovits said this qualitative study is a first of its kind in the country. While the Pew Research Center and other research centers have studied Orthodox communities and their needs, they have done so relying on a small sample of the population.
Lebovits is hoping to reach at least one adult member of every Orthodox household and will fly to Cleveland in October to offer training to community members, who will make phone calls and lead focus groups. Frank and Lebovits will conduct the personal interviews.
Data collection is expected to take about six months, with analysis and writing filling the balance of the year.
It is Lebovits’ hope that both the findings and the actual process of the study – particularly through the focus groups – will enhance social sustainability within the Orthodox community, building strength.
Original plans were to begin an in-person, door-to-door style survey in the spring and to hold focus groups in person. The COVID-19 pandemic made that prospect untenable and forced Lebovits to rethink the methodology – so the surveys will be conducted by phone, email and through social media. Virtual meetings will take place for focus groups.
Why Cleveland?
Lebovits said studying Cleveland’s Orthodox community was attractive to her as a researcher for several reasons.
First, Cleveland’s Orthodox community is the largest between New York and Chicago. A 2011 Jewish Federations of North America study placed the local Orthodox population at 10,000 of 80,800 Northeast Ohio Jews. Lebovits estimates the number of Orthodox Jews may now stand as high as 16,000.
Second, Orthodox Jews in Cleveland tend to be connected to institutions – particularly day schools and synagogues, Lebovits said – allowing for ease of connection with observant Jews.
Third, Cleveland’s multiple eruvs are connected and concentric forming a single boundary in which most local observant Jews live. An eruv is a boundary designating an area in which observant Jews may push or carry objects during Shabbos. Greater Cleveland’s eruv extends into the following communities: Beachwood, Cleveland Heights, Lyndhurst, Shaker Heights, South Euclid and University Heights. A 2019 extension takes the eruv east to Interstate 271. Thus, Lebovits said the study will aim to reach every Orthodox household within the eruv.
There are Orthodox Jews who live outside the eruv, as well within Greater Cleveland, most notably in Cleveland, Solon and Wickliffe. Lebovits said she was considering how to best include those communities.
Making focus groups count
A series of focus groups, each of five to 15 people, Lebovits said, will include adults with some presumed similar life experience such as elementary day school teachers, entrepreneurial women, school leaders, school parent bodies, male local employers, synagogue leaders and creative community workers.
While Lebovits will monitor each focus group, “We want folks within the community to be able to run these groups themselves.”
Lebovits said the hope is to hold as many focus groups as necessary to tease out common themes.
“We’re looking to hit a saturation point for all these groups,” Lebovits said. “We’re looking to include as many people as want to be included. We’re looking to do something that’s so community based that folks will be opting in.”
She said a vital aspect to any sustainability effort is awareness.
Lebovits said she hopes the focus group experience will serve to strengthen the community.
“Through the process of the session, we are creating strong social bonds and enhancing the social sustainability of the community,” she said, offering an example. “We get these women together and have a focus group. On our end, we’re trying to understand some of these broader themes and trying to facilitate them to talk more, but they’re creating community. And so, when they leave that room, they also have social ties and can create their own kind of progress, too.”
She said she and Frank have already discussed the possibility of holding follow-up studies in future years to track changing needs, assets and themes.
“There’s so much here,” Lebovits said. “There’s so much richness.”
