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To address feelings of isolation and loneliness among older adults, NY group creates innovative approach
PLAINVIEW, N.Y. — Nora Leeds had lived alone for many years in her Long Island home, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that she started to feel isolated.
She was used to working in a large office with coworkers, but then her work went fully remote. For four months, Leeds, now 69, could not see her daughter. She became increasingly depressed.
“I felt like my whole world was falling apart, like I no longer had the skills to interact with people because we were told to stay at home,” Leeds said.
Leeds hardly represents a unique case. While the pandemic exacerbated the social isolation of older adults, even before Covid-19 older Americans were experiencing an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. Nearly one-quarter of American adults age 65 and older are considered to be “socially isolated” — a circumstance in which a person has few social relationships and infrequent social contact with others. Feelings of loneliness — a subjective state that someone may feel regardless of their social contacts — are rising among older adults, too.
Both social isolation and loneliness are correlated with negative health outcomes, and older adults tend to face these challenges more acutely because they’re more likely to have their social interaction impaired by hearing loss, not working, mobility problems, chronic illness or the death of a spouse or friends.
It’s a growing problem nationwide but in particular in New York, where the share of older adults is surging. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of New Yorkers over age 65 grew by 31 percent, and the number of older adults in the state living in poverty increased by a staggering 37 percent, according to the Center for an Urban Future.
This is the challenge that UJA-Federation of New York sought to address when it launched a pioneering program in April 2021 called Isolation to Connection, which aims to identify isolated older adults and connect them to social activities, community programs and services. Now operating in all the JCCs on Long Island and one in Westchester County, Isolation to Connection helps people over age 65 connect with each other and with resources either at the JCC or at their home. The program coordinates social outings, local community programs, exercise classes, support groups, transportation and psychotherapy sessions, among other things.
When Leeds reached out to her local JCC, the Mid-Island Y Jewish Community Center, for help dealing with her isolation, staffers with the program swung into action.
“I was at a very low point when I called the Y JCC. I told them I needed help,” Leeds said.
A “connection specialist” from Isolation to Connection quickly put Leeds in touch with a social worker, who helped Leeds by encouraging her to focus on things to look forward to — anything from a trip to the supermarket to a dream trip to Ireland. Last March, Leeds finally went on her long-awaited Ireland trip, and she recently attended her first in-person connection event at the JCC.
“The pandemic laid bare the issue of loneliness across our community, particularly among older adults,” said Eric S. Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation. “Now we’re leading the way in creating a sense of belonging and connection for people who may otherwise feel unseen and forgotten. When we see an emerging communal need, we look for opportunities to leverage our partners and offer a scalable solution — that’s always been UJA’s unique role.”
One of the most important elements of the program is the connection specialists at each JCC, whose role is to connect the older adults to resources based on their individual needs.
Saralee Baim, a Long Islander in her late 70s who recently had lost her husband, went looking for help to work through her grief and deal with a troubling medical diagnosis. (Bonnie Azoulay)
“The smiles and conversation make a significant impact on the health of this vulnerable population. This program really allows the participants to get life-altering services,” said Rick Lewis, CEO of the Mid-Island Y JCC. “UJA-Federation’s support of our JCCs has empowered us to serve our community on a deeper level in combatting loneliness.”
When Saralee Baim, a Long Islander in her late 70s who recently had lost her husband, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2022, she went looking for a program to work through her grief and deal with her new illness. Her daughter called the Mid-Island Y JCC and put her in touch with the Isolation to Connection specialist there, Puja Malhotra, who connected Baim to a support group for people with Parkinson’s.
Baim began coming to the JCC four days a week and soon joined its bereavement group, a swim class for people with movement disorders and a support group for those with early-stage memory loss. Malhotra also helped Baim find a dentist and therapist.
“I needed support,” Baim said. “I really tried to focus on the help I can gather here. The JCC is the focus of my help. It’s provided me with opportunities I’d generally hold back from based on my personality.”
Even though Baim, now 79, lives with her daughter and a grandchild, she felt she needed to be with people who understood what she was going through. Once a month she attends a JCC dinner at a nearby diner with other people from the Parkinson’s group.
Healthcare experts say that addressing the isolation of older adults is critical to their health and wellbeing. Just as a physician might offer a medical prescription to someone in need of one, Isolation to Connection aims to give older adults a “social prescription” — a way for them to connect to other people, activities, and services that address their social, practical and emotional needs.
“Social prescribing is a way that many lonely, depressed, anxious people can find local solutions to feel better,” said Dan Morse, the Cofounder of Social Prescribing USA, which encourages doctors to “prescribe” activities such as art, nature activities and volunteering to isolated patients as a way of bolstering their health.
Northwell Health, which is New York State’s largest healthcare provider, is now referring patients to Isolation to Connection. Northwell doctors who see older adults at their clinics have told UJA that while they can address their patients’ medical issues, they need programs like Isolation to Connection to deal with patients’ feelings of isolation — which sometimes are the main reason for their visit to a health clinic.
Ultimately, UJA hopes it can make Isolation to Connection into a statewide program, expanding the social prescribing movement in New York in partnership with other funders.
“There’s a significant demand for the Isolation to Connection program, indicating just how endemic loneliness is among the older population. We want to bring connection specialists to every neighborhood and community around New York,” said Sepi Djavaheri, UJA senior community mobilizer. “We’re just getting started.”
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The post To address feelings of isolation and loneliness among older adults, NY group creates innovative approach appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Palestinian Authority Restructures ‘Pay-for-Slay’ System, but Questions Remain About Whether Move Is Genuine
PA President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN General Assembly in New York. Photo: Reuters/Caitlin Ochs
The Palestinian Authority has restructured its so-called “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for carrying out attacks against Israelis, in an effort to push the United States to repeal punitive legislation against the PA for its long-standing policy.
The Palestinian Authority Martyr’s Fund makes official payments to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and injured Palestinian terrorists. Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of the PA’s budget is allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.
On Monday, however, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree revoking the “laws and regulations related to the system of paying financial allowances to the families of prisoners, martyrs, and the wounded,” according to the official PA news agency WAFA.
“All families that benefited from previous laws, legislation, and regulations are subject to the same standards applied without discrimination to all families benefiting from protection and social welfare programs,” WAFA reported.
The decree means that the PA has changed its system such that payments to Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist attacks and their families will be based on their social economic status, not the acts they committed. Under the now-revoked program, Palestinians would receive more money for more severe terrorist acts — a policy that, according to critics, incentivized more terrorism.
However, Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov argued that the PA is “just restructuring the mechanism through which they pay terrorists so that they can claim it’s not them, it’s an ‘independent’ foundation doing it. An ‘independent’ foundation funded by the PA and whose board is appointed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Monday saying, “This is a new fraudulent trick by the Palestinian Authority, which intends to continue making payments to terrorists and their families through other payment channels.”
Palestinian officials told Axios they hope Abbas’s decision will improve relations with the Trump administration and with the US Congress in order for Washington to resume US financial aid to the PA.
Along with its policy change, the PA reportedly asked the US to repeal the Taylor Force Act, a 2018 law which prohibits US funding to the PA so long as it maintains its pay-for-slay program.
Critics therefore doubt the sincerity of the move. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank, noted that the PA has deceptively used “pay-for-slay” reform as a beginning chip in the past.
“The PA president … promised ‘pay-to-slay’ reform in 2020 to try to convince then incoming President Joe Biden to revoke 1987 legislation designating the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) ‘and its affiliates’ as terror groups,” FDD wrote.
Aaron Goren, a research analyst and editor at FDD, wrote in response to Monday’s news that “pay-to-slay reform is certainly welcome at face value and demonstrative of the Trump administration’s power in negotiations. However, American officials should be wary of the PA’s steadfast tactic of leveraging pay-to-slay reform to get concessions from the United States and Israel. The PA is likely to make serious demands from both nations in exchange.”
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Super Bowl Halftime Show Dancer Gets NFL Lifetime Ban for Displaying Palestinian Flag During Performance
A protester holding a flag with the words “Gaza” and “Sudan” as rapper Kendrick Lamar performed during the Super Bowl halftime show at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on Feb. 9, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
A dancer in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show has been banned for life from all National Football League stadiums and events for waving a combined Palestinian-Sudanese flag with the words “Gaza” and “Sudan” during the rapper’s performance on Sunday night at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
The NFL said the African American protester, who has not been identified, concealed the flag and unveiled it without prior knowledge by the show’s production team.
“We commend security for quickly detaining the individual who displayed the flag,” the NFL said in a released statement. “He was a part of the 400-member field cast. The individual hid the item on his person and unveiled it late in the show. No one involved with the production was aware of the individual’s intent.” The league added that the individual “will banned for life from all NFL stadiums and events.”
Toward the end of Lamar’s performance — after his track “Not Like Us” and right before his final song “TV Off” — the dancer waved the flag while standing on top of a car used as a prop in the performance. The car, a Buick Grand National GNX, inspired the name of Lamar’s latest album, “GNX,” and it was a key prop in the rapper’s halftime show performance.
“Sudan” and “Gaza” were written on the white sections of the flag held by the protester. A heart was drawn next to “Sudan” and a solidarity fist was depicted next to the word “Gaza.” The dancer, who wore a black ensemble matching the other dancers on stage, also jumped off the car and fled the stage while still displaying the flag. He waved it while standing on the ground near other dancers before security personnel tackled and detained him. He was then removed from the field and escorted from the stadium. New Orleans police told USA Today that as of Monday, the performer has not been formally arrested or charged.
The incident took place a day after three more Israeli hostages were freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza, as part of a ceasefire agreement in the war between the terrorist organization and Israel, and while a civil war rages on in Sudan.
The New Orleans Police Department said it “continues to work with NFL and the halftime production team to ascertain any affiliation the individual may have had with the halftime show.”
The entertainment company behind the halftime show, Roc Nation, said in a statement that “the act by the individual was neither planned nor part of the production and was never in any rehearsal.”
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CAIR Accuses Israel of Moving ‘Genocide’ Into West Bank
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization that purports to advocate for Muslim Americans, has accused Israel of “moving the genocide from Gaza to the occupied West Bank,” lambasting the Jewish state for committing a litany of alleged human rights abuses in recent days.
In a Monday statement, CAIR accused Israel of displacing thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroying Palestinian neighborhoods, murdering a pregnant woman and her baby, and unjustly raiding a Palestinian bookstore.
“The radical Israeli government is clearly trying to move its genocidal campaign of slaughter and destruction from Gaza to the West Bank, where Israeli occupation forces are driving thousands of Palestinians from their homes, destroying entire neighborhoods, kidnapping hundreds, and randomly shooting others, including an eight-months pregnant woman and her baby,” CAIR said in its statement. “Indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is a sociopath leading an army of war criminals, and our government must stop spending American taxpayer dollars on his latest campaign of murder, ethnic cleansing and destruction in the West Bank.”
In the 16 months following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s cross-border invasion of and massacre across southern Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, the Jewish state has ramped up operations to uproot terrorists in the West Bank.
These efforts intensified last month, when Israel launched a counterterrorism effort in the West Bank coined “Operation Iron Wall”” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops, gunships, and drones operated in Jenin to extract Palestinian terrorists from the town and its adjacent refugee camps. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the operation was greenlit “on the directive of the security cabinet” with the aim of “bolstering security in Judea and Samaria [Israel’s preferred terminoloy for the West Bank].”
Jenin Mayor Mohammad Jarrar claimed that 150 buildings had been destroyed in the town as a result of the operation, suggesting that Israeli officials approved the operation with the intent of driving out the Palestinian population from the West Bank and annexing the territory.
Israel has long accused Iran of supplying armed factions in Jenin, particularly its refugee camp, with weapons. Palestinian terrorists have long been active in the city. Israel has been especially alarmed by the rise of the Jenin Brigades, a new armed group.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN body responsible for Palestinian refugees, alleged that Israel inflicted “forced displacement” on some 40,000 Palestinians. The Israeli government and research organizations have publicized findings in recent months showing numerous UNRWA-employed staff, including teachers and school principals, are active Hamas members, some of whom were directly involved in Hamas’s Oc t. 7 atrocities, while many others openly celebrated it.
CAIR’s latest accusation against Israel was not its first time stepping into controversy. In the 2000s, the organization was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago last November. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
CAIR has accused Israel of committing atrocities beyond Gaza and the West Bank. In December, the Islamic group said the Jewish state was guilty of “ethnic cleansing” in Syria following the recent collapse of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime, despite the limited nature of Israel’s military operations in the neighboring country.
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