Putting out a welcome mat for seniors
The Jewish Community Housing Corporation’s CEO explores what home means to him

When you talk to Harold Colton-Max, the CEO of the Jewish Community Housing Corporation, you understand why he’s devoted his life to it.
The organization’s name might be off-puttingly bureaucratic, but the JCHC is fueled by an emotional as well as an intellectual understanding of what home means. It’s not about “home” as a fuzzy synonym for “house,” as realtors often use it. It’s about making sure that seniors — which is a crude term but there don’t seem to be any better ones to describe people 62 and older, which covers a lot of people — can live in places that genuinely are home.
It’s about rooting yourself someplace real.
Mr. Colton-Max has deep roots in the community, and it shows.
So — who is he, and what is the JCHC?
First, the JCHC.
The JCHC is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide housing for seniors in Essex and Morris counties. “We have four buildings, with over 450 units,” Mr. Colton-Max said. Two of those buildings are in South Orange, one is in West Orange, and one is in Whippany. Two offer what is euphemistically but also accurately and lovingly called “affordable independent living,” the third provides the more upscale “independent living,” and the fourth has not only independent living — basically your own apartment, as well as a dining room and carefully curated programs — but assisted living, memory care, and respite care as well. (Assisted living provides more services to residents who either don’t want to or more often can’t live on their own, memory care is for people who no longer have much access to their own memories, and respite care is for people who live in their own homes with a caretaker; the respite itself is for those caretakers.)
Mr. Colton-Max traces the history of the group he heads to the 1970s. Until then, the Daughters of Miriam — an organization whose history and mission are connected to the JCHC — provided skilled nursing and geriatric care, but “our founding president, Arthur Schechner, was part of a group of lay leaders who saw the gap between what the Daughters of Miriam did and the seniors who were living in their own homes here but no longer could do so, or were living elsewhere but had family in the area and wanted to be closer to the family,” Mr. Colton-Max said. “There was no option for them at the time.
“Then the federal government came forward with a new program for subsidized, affordable senior housing. So those lay leaders came together to apply for and successfully obtained some of the earliest Section 202 grants.
“They’re not really grants,” he explained. “The Feds would give you money to build the building — they would pay for 100 percent of it — and then they would convert it to a mortgage and give you a subsidy.
“In order for us to be able to serve low-income people 62 or older or who are disabled, who can’t afford to pay, we have to certify that they are low-income. Then, we can charge them only about 30 percent of their income as rent. So over time, we have some people who may be paying as little as $25 a month. The average is probably in the $200 range.”
“Our lay leaders applied for and got some of the first awards that led to our opening the Jewish Federation Plaza in 1980,” Mr. Colton-Max said. “It’s a 135-unit apartment building in West Orange.”
There was some discussion between Daughters of Miriam and the separate entity that became the Jewish Community Housing Corporation of Metropolitan New Jersey.
“We’ve always been open to everybody, of any faith,” Mr. Colton-Max continued. “It is our hope that we are able to provide for Jews.” The goal is to help everyone who needs help but to be able to keep the buildings the group runs feeling Jewish.
“We are an owner and manager of housing for seniors — that is a central part of what we do — but that is not enough. We have to be more than a landlord.
“We provide some services directly — assisted living programs, meals, housekeeping, lectures, transportation. Those are a central part of what we do. We also hire rabbis, through the federation” — that’s the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest — “to provide religious services, education, and pastoral care. They will go to see residents where they live, or in the hospital.
“We pay the rabbis ourselves,” he added. “We don’t get federal funds for that.”
Most of the rabbis are Orthodox, he said, but one or two are Conservative.

“Over time, the Jewish Community Housing Corporation has expanded,” he continued. “We do what we need to do to meet the needs of the community. So we started with subsidized housing, but then we realized that there was a need for housing for people who don’t need luxury housing but don’t qualify as low-income.
“So our next project was the Village Apartments in South Orange. That meets the needs of people who sometimes are called the missing middle. It opened in 1988, and now has 79 units, all independent living. And we have our other building in South Orange, around the corner from the Village Apartments. It’s got 66 units, and it serves people who qualify as low-income.
“Those apartments all are regular apartments, with their own kitchens. They also have features and amenities that seniors might want — computers, exercise equipment, and televisions in communal spaces.
“At this point, in Essex County we are focused on independent living. We are not serving people who cannot live independently. So in order to continue to innovate and expand and meet community needs, we created Lester Senior Community Housing. It opened in 2001; it was the first and still is the only Jewish community agency-sponsored housing in Morris County for seniors. It’s on the federation’s campus in Whippany.”
Lester, which is celebrating its 25th birthday, includes both 120 independent living apartments and 52 assisted living ones. “The independent living apartments are higher end, although they’re not luxury,” Mr. Colton-Max said.
“Thirty percent of them — 35 apartments — are set aside for people of low or moderate income. It’s not subsidized, but the rent is affordable. Thirty percent is a high percentage, but it is driven by Jewish values.

“On the assisted living side, we serve people on Medicaid. We are hovering at about 20 percent of the residents on Medicaid.’
Lester does not offer a full continuum of care, because there is no nursing care available there. “But we are finding that people are coming in with a greater emphasis on aging in place, so we can help them stay in their own homes for longer.”
Mr. Colton-Max and his colleagues found another change, leading to another need. “We were finding people experiencing more cognitive decline,” he said. “More of them had Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.
“So in 2018 we converted a floor in our assisted living facility at Lester to be a secure memory care suite. We managed to get it in before the pandemic.
“No other Jewish communal agency is providing that type of service in greater MetroWest,” he added.
And, he said, “it is important to say that we don’t get an annual allocation from the federation. We are maybe the only agency in the community that doesn’t. But still, it is important to say also that the federation is an important supporter of all our projects, and none of them more than Lester.
“The Jewish community, and the federation under the leadership of Max Kleinman, took the lead on fundraising. The community came together and raised $12 million, and $9 million of it went to the construction of Lester. We used the rest to create an endowment that continues to provide benefits to the community to this day, almost 25 years later.
“The endowment subsidizes the rest of those residents who can no longer afford — or can’t afford — to pay the rent. This applies both to our market-rate buildings, Lester and the Village Apartments, and to the affordable ones.
“We have people living in our buildings who had a spouse who passed away, whose income they needed. There are residents in our buildings who come upon harder times. There are issues when you go through all your assets.
“We have been able to assist almost everybody who has come to us when we determine that they are not able to pay the rent with the resources they have available. The one exception is residents who really do need a higher level of care than we can provide. So if someone tells us, say, that ‘I need an aide 24 hours a day, seven days a week,’ that is much more than rent. So there are very limited circumstances when we can’t help.”
The JCHC helps people, but it can’t fix the world. “Our country has an affordable housing crisis,” Mr. Colton-Max said. “We have a waiting list that’s months or even years long, particularly for the subsidized apartments. We would very much like to build more affordable housing, but it is very difficult.”
Given the price of land in New Jersey, it’s particularly difficult here, he added.

The JCHC has gotten a $1 million gift from the Baltimore-based Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation, Mr. Colton-Max said. “It funds Jewish organizations in the States and in Israel, and it funds senior housing in the States.” He’s particularly grateful to the foundation.
Now, the JCHC is renovating Lester. It’s received a great deal of financial support for this undertaking, mainly from large donors. The first phase, fixing up the main building, is complete; now it’s raising money for the second phase, which will upgrade the grounds.
It’s a project about which Mr. Colton-Max is passionate — but then, he’s passionate about all of JCHC’s work.
Why does this job, overseeing housing for aging or elderly, at times financially hurting Jews, mean so much to him?
What is it about creating homes for people that engages his heart as well as his head?
To begin with, the area where he’s working now — Essex County, and particularly its southwestern quadrant — has been home for him for most of his life. “I grew up in Maplewood, and then we moved to Short Hills, where my parents, Judy and Stewart Colton, still live,” Mr. Colton-Max said. His father retired as president of Alpha Metals, his mother is a retired educator and computer consultant, and both his parents are major philanthropists, so the idea of giving to others was an ingrained part of his life, taught as much by example as more formally.
He went to public school in Maplewood and then to a private school — Pingry — when it still was in Hillside. Next, he went to Princeton. All of them, to state the obvious, are in New Jersey.
“I majored in American politics in college, and I figured that with my Princeton degree, I’d go down to Washington and everyone would want me.” So he made the move out of state. Needless to say, getting that first job wasn’t easy, but he kept trying, and “I did end up working for the Democratic National Committee. I worked for the platform committee in 1991-92, for Bill Clinton,” on his presidential campaign.
“I wanted to be part of changing the direction of the country,” Mr. Colton-Max said. “So I worked on the Clinton-Gore campaign, in its suburban office, in Livingston. And New Jersey went Democratic that year, for the first time since 1968.
“In a small way I had been a part of changing the leadership of the country, and I wanted to keep being part of the change. So I worked for a small nonprofit, OMB Watch — it doesn’t exist any more. I was a policy analyst, focusing on federal budgets and nonprofit advocacy issues.
“We were working on bringing together coalitions of other groups in Washington, to help their constituencies have their voices heard. But while I was there, the House turned Republican” — that was in 1984, when Newt Gingrich, on the way to becoming Speaker of the House, issued his norm-breaking, rage-politics-creating Contract With America — “and I figured that nonprofit organizations and communities would have to do more work with less resources. So I figured also that they would have to be better managed to find more innovative ways of funding.
“All that suggested that I should go to business school.
“So we moved to New York, and I went to Columbia for an MBA, focusing on nonprofits.”
“We” was Harold Colton, as he was at the time, and Nomi Max. The couple married in 1994. Ms. Colton-Max “is very active in the progressive Zionist world,” Mr. Colton-Max said. “She is the chair of Ameinu and vice president of the American Zionist Movement.”
The Colton-Maxes lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when he was in graduate school, and then they moved to Brooklyn, but “I always wanted to work in New Jersey,” he said. “I always wanted to come back to New Jersey. It was important to me to come back.”
Why? “Because it is my state, my community, my home. I have always felt that this is where I wanted to make a difference.”
While he was at Columbia, Mr. Colton-Max worked at a nonprofit in Newark. “That helped me get a foothold back in Jersey,” he said. “Then, when I graduated, I was the executive director of a small nonprofit community development corporation in Jersey City, called the Fairmount Housing Corporation. I ran that for seven years.
“By that point we’d moved to New Jersey; we’re now in South Orange.
“My time at the job in Jersey City was coming to a close. I wanted to continue to work with people who needed help in the state of New Jersey, so I applied for and was hired to be the executive director of the JCHC.” That was 20 years ago; 17 years ago his title was changed to CEO, but his job remained unchanged.
So part of the forces driving Mr. Colton-Max were his needs to help people who needed help, and to focus on the elderly. But part of it was Jewish.
His family always had been active in the local Jewish community. The family belonged to Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, and that’s where Harold became bar mitzvah. “I always was taught Jewish values,” he said.
“I was taught about tzedakah, about taking care of your elders, about tikkun olam. About being a mensch. When I learned about the JCHC, when I learned what it did, when I interviewed for the job and saw the buildings, it really spoke to me. And it has spoken to me ever since.
“I want to make sure, and JCHC wants to make sure, that those who want to be in this community always have a place to live in this community. We are a part of a broader network of agencies that makes that happen — whether it’s Daughters of Miriam or JESPY House or Jewish Service for the Developmentally Disabled or Jewish Vocational Services or Jewish Family Services. We are part of a larger community.”
Nomi and Harold Colton-Max are active members of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, where Ms. Colton-Max is a past president. They’re the parents of two sons; one is a third-year law student at Columbia, and the other is a senior at the University of Southern California. Both are poised to continue the family tradition of community building.
The Colton-Maxes live out the concept of home as the place that nurtures you, provides you with security and love and connection and then supports you as you work to ensure that as many people as possible also have homes where they too can find love. It’s a mission that mixes accounting, business acumen, fundraising, Jewish values, empathy, compassion, and love, and it’s a mission for which Mr. Colton-Max’s life has prepared him.
Learn more about the Jewish Community Housing Corporation at jchcorp.org.
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