Focus on Issues: Jewish Aids Educator in N.Y. Battles Prudishness and Denialin Community

As a teen-age girl at the East Midwood Jewish Center rolls a condom down a cucumber, Bob Zielony looks on with approval.

After nearly six years as director of HIV/AIDS prevention and education for the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, the burly man in jeans and a tattered baseball cap is hardly squeamish.

But Zielony, who holds a doctorate in health psychology, knows it takes a lot more than vegetables to convince pubescent teens, even the nice Jewish ones who gather for his programs, to act responsibly to protect themselves against AIDS.

He also knows he is competing for limited resources and attention spans in a struggle many in the Jewish community and elsewhere would rather not confront.

“Most people don’t understand the commitment of financial resources and time it’s going to take to save lives in the Jewish Community,” said Zielony, who is the only full-time educator employed by the New York Jewish community to address prevention of AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

But Zielony, 39, who first came in contact with AIDS while doing doctoral research at a South Bronx methadone clinic, remains convinced that it is possible to reach people and stop the flow of the AIDS epidemic.

He has decided to battle prudishness and denial to send out his warning.

As he travels to schools, offices, community centers and PTA meetings, talking to students, parents and educators, Zielony tries to teach people, and especially kids, how to teach each other about contraction of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“We need to get to the point where it is `cool’ to engage in healthier behaviors,” said Zielony, who has trained dozens of teen-agers as peer educators, who help organize and integrate AIDS awareness programs.

By having kids themselves participate, and by addressing groups as a Jew in a Jewish context, Zielony hopes to drive home the notion that people are at risk based on their behavior and not according to their membership in a particular group.

While he sometimes invokes Jewish themes in his programs – such as pikuach nefesh, the obligation under Jewish law to save lives under any circumstances – Zielony said the fight against AIDS is a non-sectarian pursuit.

“We can no longer ask in any community, `Is AIDS a problem?'” said Zielony.

According to a 1993 report by the UJA-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, an estimated 25,000 Jews in the United States are infected with HIV, while at least 4,000 are said to have AIDS.

Despite the statistics, there remains a perception that certain groups are not at risk.

To show kids that despite their upbringing or preconceptions, they are indeed at risk of being infected with HIV, Zielony brings an assistant to speak at his programs, a young Jewish man who grew up in an affluent suburban community and who is now HIV positive.

Scott, a Long Island native who was raised in the Conservative movement, said that despite some outreach efforts he does not feel that he can turn to the organized Jewish community for support.

“When kids tell me that because they’re Jewish and they come from an upper middle class home and they’re the chosen people, and therefore they won’t get infected, how is Judaism helping the community?” he asked.

Scott is Zielony’s third assistant. The first two died of AIDS-related illnesses.

The problem of dealing with AIDS is exacerbated by the long incubation period of the HIV virus, which Zielony said allows people to remain in denial about the disease.

AIDS cases appearing today can be the result of activities from as long as a decade ago, and many people will not know the effects of their current behavior patterns until after the year 2000.

There is also a stigma surrounding AIDS, especially in the Jewish community, because of its common association with homosexuality and illegal drug use.

Zielony said that even in the face of this life-threatening crisis, many in the Jewish community are reluctant to speak openly about sex.

Some of the greatest resistance to AIDS education comes from Orthodox schools, where there is both a reluctance to discuss sexuality in general, and an assumption that students should not, and therefore will not, engage in premarital sex.

An AIDS education trainer’s manual published by the UJA-Federation in New York reflects the combination of prudishness and good intentions that have characterized the Jewish community’s response to the crisis thus far.

The manual instructs educators to stress the need for safe sex, but does not elaborate on the kinds of sexual activities that put someone at risk of contracting HIV. The specifics are contained in a supplementary booklet which some schools have refused to distribute.

Zielony worries that the real problems are not being addressed.

“Some people are putting more effort into censorship than into making sure that people get the life-saving information they need,” Zielony said.

When state funding for his programs was cut in 1992, Zielony was left to rely entirely on UJA-Federation allocations, making him the only full-time AIDS educator employed by the New York Jewish community.

This means that some people will get the message while others, particularly those in private schools – which unlike public schools do not have mandatory AIDS education – may not get it at all.

Simha Rosenberg, AIDS project coordinator for UJA-Federation in New York, said the problem is too many aspects of the AIDS crisis competing for limited funds.

“We’re constantly juggling priorities between prevention and care,” she said.

Rosenberg said it is difficult to drum up donations for AIDS-related services because, unlike Israel or Jewish continuity, AIDS is not viewed as a uniquely Jewish issue.

“We have a limited capacity to deal with something that’s so unremitting,” said Andy Rose, who runs an HIV/AIDS clinic in Los Angeles. “We like problems that have solutions,” he said.

Rose has tried unsuccessfully to start a national Jewish AIDS project in Washington.

“It’s not that people in the Jewish community don’t care. But people after a while don’t know what to do. They want to move on to the next issue,” he said.

But for Zielony, there is no moving on until an adequate resolution to the AIDS crisis has been reached.

“When the history books are written about this one, I hope it says that although we may have had a slow start, we became responsive.”