A $290,000 grant from the United States Labor Department will enable the Jewish Vocational Service of MetroWest NJ to train 58 people with disabilities for entry-level positions in the banking industry.

The grant to JVS is being channeled through the International Association of Jewish Vocational Services, which received $1 million from the Labor Department and split it among three communities.

JVS is a beneficiary agency of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.

The JVS will partner with two corporations, Sovereign Bank and Pershing LLC, a securities clearing house in Jersey City, to prepare prospective employees for jobs as office workers and bank tellers.

According to MetroWest JVS executive director Leonard Schneider, the bank “is very interested in working with us from the commercial banking end in helping us place people in their local branches.”

But Schneider said, since it’s unlikely that any single bank will have many suitable openings, he expects to reach out to other financial institutions to hire trainees in addition to the two initial sponsors.

“After recruiting and training the individuals, ultimately we have to place them into job positions,” he said. “We are obligated under the grant to be training and placing 19 people a year and…working with an additional 10 people in the institution.”

Jewish vocational service agencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles are also beneficiaries of the program, which allocated nearly $6 million to five job training agencies across the country.

“Our organization was selected because of our particular expertise in training people with disabilities,” said Schneider.

The JVS executive said he will not know the program’s official start date for another three to four weeks. “We will have to go about working with our partners and customize a training curriculum that will be specific to their job requirements,” he explained.

Training will be carried out at both JVS in East Orange and in other parts of the community, he said, citing “a particular relationship with the NJ Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Service in such key cities as Jersey City, Newark, Morristown, as well as in Bergen, Hudson, and Passaic counties. We will use that as a beginning point to recruit individuals from DVRS offices in those communities and take those individuals through the training program.”

Schneider boasted that a specially produced video will help recruits learn the job skills they will need.

“Our agency innovated a customer service training program that is now on CD Rom, and has been used to deliver customized skills training,” he said. “One of the contributions to this grant will be to hopefully demonstrate our effectiveness in a curriculum skills training program to enable individuals to learn basic skills that are integral to success in the financial services industry.”