Setting up home

Jewish Association for Community Living celebrates 30 years

By Cindy Mindell

JCL residents in the kitchen of their Arapahoe Road home.

WEST HARTFORD – Three decades ago, there were two residential options for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities: an institution or at home with parents who had little communal support.

Societal change was afoot: the federal government was beginning to develop laws to guarantee public education for students with special needs. In June 1979, a local group of parents were launching their own quiet revolution, when West Hartford resident Marlene Scharr convened a meeting to discuss options for children with developmental disabilities.

Next month, what would become the Jewish Association for Community Living (JCL) will celebrate its 30th anniversary at Beth El Temple in West Hartford.

Scharr was catapulted into the world of special needs in 1966 when her daughter, Elizabeth, was born with Down syndrome. “All the parents I met were concerned about what would happen to our children once we were no longer here,” Scharr says. “At the time, when someone had a child with a disability, especially Down syndrome or ‘retardation’ there wasn’t a place for them and oftentimes the child would stay at home. There were even elderly parents who moved into the Hebrew Home for the Elderly [in West Hartford]

and had to take their adult children with them. It didn’t make sense at all. But some parents didn’t know how to give their children independence.”

Scharr was serving on the board of Greater Hartford Association of Retarded Citizens (now HARC) and was a member of the organization’s first committee for residential homes, which sought government funding to set up group homes throughout the state.

JCL residents celebrate Chanukah.

“I didn’t want to get involved with the government and felt more comfortable with the Jewish community because I know how we take care of our people,” she says. Long active in the local Jewish community, Scharr and her group, the Committee for the Developmentally Disabled, brought the idea to the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford. With the support of Executive Vice President Howard Charish, the endeavor became a communal one. The JCC of Greater Hartford (now the Mandell JCC) opened its doors to JCL members; Beth El Temple in West Hartford hosted a Sunday school program. An auxiliary was launched for fund-raising and public relations activities. Three years later, in 1982, the organization was incorporated as the Jewish Association for Communal Living.

Funded by private donations and a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Hartford, and guided by real-estate developers Max Javit and Michael Konover, JCL purchased a property on Arapaho Road in West Hartford Center, where it opened its first kosher group home in 1983. Six men and women moved into the six-bedroom facility,

two of whom – Janet Bialik and Jay Butler – will be honored at the Nov. 8 event. (The other four original residents were middle-aged and seniors when they entered the home, and have since died, says JCL director Denis Geary.)

“The Jewish community was fantastic; they really supported the whole idea in a very caring and accepting way,” Scharr says. “It was a whole new concept, and Hartford was one of the first and few Jewish communities to have this kind of home where residents could have their own lives. I give a lot of credit to the families who entrusted their children to us.”

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