JWeekly, By Gayle Donsky

With the Jewish community’s participation this week in Project Homeless Connect, offering homeless and low-income individuals in San Francisco a range of needed services, this is a good time to reflect on our Jewish values and our response to the nation’s poor.

The statistics are daunting. In San Francisco, an estimated 6,000 children and adults are homeless each night. Nationally, according to First Focus, a bipartisan advocacy organization, in the 2011-2012 school year more than 1 million homeless students were enrolled in preschools and K-12 schools — the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the 2008 recession.

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