by Dr. Mitch Shiller, Howard Berger, and Gail Small

Federation CJA is proud to announce the merger on April 1, 2008 of Jewish Employment Montreal (JEM), Jewish Immigration Aid Services Montreal (JIAS), and Jewish Family Services (JFS) into a new agency – Agence Ometz.

The merger is a prime example of how we are streamlining our system to deliver services more efficiently and effectively. Dr. Mitch Shiller, Immediate Past President of Jewish Family Ser-vices, becomes the first president of Ometz.

Howard Berger and Gail Small assume the positions of co-Executive Directors. Howard was previously Executive Director of JEM and Gail was previously Executive Director of JFS.

In consolidating our expertise in employment, immigration and social services, we are responding to the needs of our community – something we have been doing since we began serving it nearly 150 years ago. Our goal remains constant: to contribute to the strength of Montreal’s Jewish community. How we go about achieving it, though, evolves with the times.

Today, it makes sense to do what we have done: integrate what we know to be the best practices and systems from among the three agencies and braid them to create a structure that avoids redundancies and makes better use of the community’s finite resources.

The merger, approved recently by the Boards of Directors of the three agencies, follows more than a year of deliberation and careful planning that included consultation with professional and lay leaders.

Guiding us throughout was our consideration for the best interests of our clients. For the most part, they are individuals and families who are experiencing a period of vulnerability and looking to us for help and empowerment. There are myriad reasons for this vulnerability, which almost always features more than a single dimension: perhaps they are new immigrants to Montreal, trying to make their way in an environment of which they know little in terms of work, schooling or housing opportunities; perhaps a parent’s serious illness has a trickledown effect on the family, with its income and means drastically reduced and scared children having trouble at school; perhaps a family led by a parent who is newly single and caught in the vise of poverty, like a mother who finds herself alone and isolated when a marriage ends, in need of assistance to find a way to support her family but daunted by the task after several years outside the work force.

Agence Ometz is in a position to deliver integrated services in a way the three agencies could not when they were operating independently. There is, for one, the promise of coordinated service delivery, ensured by a centralized intake service and by a case management approach designed to deliver personalized and culturally sensitive services. And there is, obviously, the convenience factor of being able to access an array of services from a single agency. Services are, by definition, more accessible.

With the merger, then, we create a single agency that we believe will operate more efficiently and, by extension, more effectively. Our clients will experience no disruption in service as the transition takes place from three agencies to one.

Ometz is the Hebrew word for courage. We chose it because it conveys our confidence that the merger represents a bold, brave vision for the future – and because it reflects our aspirations for our clients. Ometz is an expression of hope that we will be a source of strength and courage to those who seek out our services. It is our commitment to them.

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Federation CJA is a registered charitable organization pursuant to the Canadian Income Tax Act - Registration number: 106702251RR0001.
Federation CJA is a 501c(3) non-profit Community Organization - 98-018 3709.
All donations to Federation CJA are tax-deductible in full.