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Eckstein wants to know why the Jews aren’t saving FSU Jewry

By Jacob Berkman · July 14, 2009

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which raises about $100 million per year in small donations from evangelical Christians and gives the money to Jewish and Zionist causes, is miffed that the Jewish people are not coming up with more money to save Jewish life in the former Soviet Union.

He is miffed that the government of Israel is seemingly Welsching on several million dollars that it pledged to help the Heftsiba school system in the FSU.

Heftsiba, which was started as a covert operation run out of the office of Israel’s prime minister during the 1960s as a way to sneak Zionist education, Hebrew education and Jewish religious supplies to Soviet Jews, became its own school system after the fall of communism. It was run out of the Israeli Education Ministry for nearly 20 years before being handed off to the Jewish Agency for Israel about two years ago, according to Eckstein.

Last year the 26-school Heftsiba system looked like it was going to be a casualty of the economic downturn, the Madoff scandal and the Jewish Agency facing an $80 million budget cut. But then in February Eckstein’s IFCJ stepped in with emergency funding. 

Eckstien said that he would match up to $5 million in funding over the course of this year to keep the schools afloat, so long as other Jewish donors matched the funds. The Israeli government pledged to pitch in $1 million. Based on that pledge, the fellowship cut a $1 million check to Heftsiba.

According to Eckstein, Israel has yet to pay up, even though it said it would do so immediately.

“The bottom line is that the government said it would take care of Heftsiba, but it hasn’t even sent the money it owes from six months ago, and yesterday I get a letter from the school in Harkov, Ukraine, that they are closing their doors,” Eckstein told The Fundermentalist on Tuesday. “They never got the money from the government of Israel and have no reassurance they will be able to get funding in September, so there goes 125 Jewish kids in Harkov, who don’t have a Jewish future.”

Eckstein said that he has been pushing the government to come up with the money. But the responsibility for paying the $1 million is being passed from ministry to ministry, with no one wanting the money to come out of their own budget, Eckstein said.

He had a meeting with Knesset members on June 2 to press for the money. He was unable to get an answer, but was told that the Education Ministry will take over the Heftsiba system from the Jewish Agency next fall.

The Israeli government pledged to “give $1 million, and it hasn’t even done that yet, and they are going ahead and accepting commitments for next year before they have even honored their commitment from past six months,” Eckstien said, chiding the Israeli government. “Who is to believe them? I certainly don’t.”

The money to Heftsiba was part of an $12 million pledge that the fellowship made to save three Jewish school systems in the FSU, including $6 million to keep the Chabad school system running. The Chabad system was heavily financed by Lev Leviev, the diamond mogul who saw his stock plummet by 90 percent, losing him a half a billion dollars over the past year.

The fellowship also gave $1 million to the Shma Yisrael school system, which had been heavily financed by the Reichmann family of Canada.

While most charities are floundering, the fellowship is on pace to raise more money this year than it ever has. Last year the organization took in roughly $90 million; this year, Eckstein said, it is already 20 percent above pace. He project that the fellowship will end up raising between $110 million and $120 million in 2009.

But Eckstein wants to know why the Jewish community is not stepping up to offer more assistance to Jews in the former Soviet Union, after spending 20 years of helping to build a community there.

“The Jewish community can’t come up with $2 million for future of Jewish children?” he said.

Even taking into account the Madoff scam and the economic crisis, Eckstein said it was a "shonda" -- or shame -- "that world Jewry, can’t pay for the $2 million and it has to have Christians from California or from Florida pay.”

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Merage foundation give Technion $12 million to start MBA program

By Jacob Berkman · July 13, 2009

The Andre and Katherine Merage Foundation of Southern California has given the American Technion Society a $12 million gift to start a business school at Israel’s premier technical college.

The gift will go to start the new Andre and Katherine Merage-Technion Institute for International Business at the Technion: Israel Institute of Technology.

The institute, set to open in 2010, will feature an English-only international executive MBA program to train future high-tech leaders. It will also have three centers of excellence that will help Israel's high-tech companies penetrate markets in the U.S, Europe and Asia, according to the ATS.

Of the total gift, $8 million is for the program over the first several years, and $4 million will be available when it is determined that the institute needs its own building.

Here is the press release:

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Live at noon, the truth about day school boards

By Jacob Berkman · July 13, 2009

Yeshiva University has conducted a survey of presidents of day school boards of trustees.

What it found is pretty disturbing -- essentially the vast majority of presidents of day schools feel that their boards are underperforming and that is a contributor to their schools' financial difficulties.

The information is embargoed until noon, but you can watch the teleconference announcing the data at noon at www.yu.edu/live.

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No appeal for Madoff

By Jacob Berkman · July 9, 2009

Bernard Madoff will not appeal the 150-year jail sentence he was given earlier this month, his attorney said Thursday.

"We are not going to be appealing," Madoff's lawyer Ira Sorkin said, according to Reuters. "That's our decision and we have no further comment."

Madoff has not yet been assigned a permanent prison.
 

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Nevzlin to be international chair of the GA

By Jacob Berkman · July 9, 2009

The UJC/Jewish Federations of North America has named ex-Russian oligarch Leonid Nevzlin, who now lives in Israel, as the international chair of its annual General Assembly, which will be held in Washington, D.C., in November.

Nevzlin is becoming more involved in the federation system and its overseas activities apparently. In June, just before the executive meetings of the Jewish Agency for Israel, he spoke out about the need to strengthen the Jewish Agency.

LEONID NEVZLIN TO SERVE AS INTERNATIONAL CHAIR OF GA

July 9, 2009
UJC/Jewish Federations of North America is proud to announce that Leonid Nevzlin, a leading businessman and outstanding Jewish philanthropist, will serve as international chair of the 2009 General Assembly.

Mr. Nevzlin’s remarkable philanthropic work extends from his native Russia to the State of Israel, where he made aliyah in 2003.

"I strongly believe that Jewish Peoplehood is the key to ensure that Jews wherever they choose to live will remain one people in the future," said Nevzlin. "UJC represents the strongest partnership of the Jewish people committed to our common future. I am pleased to be a part of the GA, the federation system's signature event."

In Russia, Mr. Nevzlin established the Moscow Jewish Cultural Center and the International Center for Russian and East European Jewish Studies. He also worked to develop numerous Jewish educational programs in partnership with ORT, the Jewish Agency for Israel, JDC and the Holocaust Fund.

In Israel, Mr. Nevzlin established the NADAV Fund to support initiatives that strengthen Jewish peoplehood, build substantive and pluralistic Jewish identity, and create lasting connections among Jews the world over.

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HIAS receives 4-star rating

By Jacob Berkman · July 9, 2009

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society has received a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator.

From HIAS:

HIAS RECEIVES TOP RATING FROM CHARITY NAVIGATOR
Proof that donors’ trust in HIAS is well placed

(New York, NY – July 9, 2009) – HIAS, the international migration agency of the American Jewish community, has received a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, an independent charity evaluator, highly regarded in the philanthropic world for its data-driven analysis that rates charitable organizations on their ability to efficiently manage and grow the organization's finances. According to Charity Navigator, approximately a quarter of the charities evaluated receive this, their highest rating.

According to Ken Berger, President of Charity Navigator, receiving four out of a possible four stars indicates that “HIAS executes its mission in a fiscally responsible way and outperforms most other charities in America. This ‘exceptional’ designation from Charity Navigator differentiates HIAS from its peers and demonstrates to the public it is worthy of their trust.”

“This top rating confirms that donors’ confidence is well placed in HIAS and our mission of serving the underserved Jewish and non-sectarian refugees and migrants of the world. As we continue to grow and achieve great things, our donors rightfully expect accountability and transparency from us, especially in these challenging financial times,” stated Gideon Aronoff, President & CEO of HIAS. “We are pleased to have this favorable report card that further enhances our visibility and viability in a highly competitive market.”

Data from Charity Navigator shows that visitors to their website give more than originally planned after viewing the information on their website.
 

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JDC faces significant budget crunch

By Jacob Berkman · July 9, 2009

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is facing a significant budget shortfall, according to recent communications from its CEO, Steven Schwager.

Schwager wrote to his board in his July 7 newsletter with some good news -- that the organization had been selected as a 4-star charity by the online charity evaluator, charitynavigator.org. But this apparently was the first time in a while he has relayed good tidings.

The Joint is in the early stages of planning its budget for 2010, according to Schawger’s previous letter, dated June 30, and is anticipating a significant budget deficit -- most of which he seems to be laying in the lap of the federation system and its umbrella organization, the UJC/Jewish Federations of North America.

About 20 percent of the Joint’s budget, which in 2009 is $332 million, is made up of undesignated funds given by donors for core operating expenses. The UJC provides the lion’s share of that. In May 2009, the Joint had $73.8 million in undesignated funds, of which the UJC and the federation system provided $37 million. But the picture for 2010 is much worse, as the Joint is anticipating a 12 percent budget cut, Schwager said in the newsletter:

Our 2010 best estimates at this point are that only $66.1 million of undesignated funds will be available. This represents a shortfall of $7.8 million for 2010. The majority of the shortfall is expected to be the result of reduced overseas support from the UJC/Federation system.

Given the Board’s balanced budget policy, if we do not find new sources of funds, an $8 million reduction in undesignated funds will mean a significant reduction in our programs and activities across the globe. As you know, we leverage our undesignated funds on a ratio of four to one. This reduction in undesignated funds of $8 million could translate into an overall budget reduction of about $40 million in 2010.

Schwager also hints at layoffs:

In the last seven years during my tenure as CEO and EVP, thanks to changes in our methods of operation, we have reduced our staff complement from 948 in 2003 to 766 in 2009. This is a reduction of 20 percent and our 2010 numbers will be even lower.

This follows 40 layoffs that were made last June, that were accompanied by cuts in programing.

But in truth, Schwager said in another letter dated June 9, the Joint has no real way of knowing how it should project its budget because it has no idea how much money it will get from the federations even for this year, as the system has been giving less than it promised:

At the May 2009 meetings, we reduced the amount of money we expect to receive in 2009 from the UJC system by an additional $2 million. Our 2009 budget is now projecting about $37 million from UJC.

Our finance staff, however, has already reported an even greater shortfall than anticipated in UJC funding thus far this year. As most of you know, the majority of federation funding comes to JDC at year end when people pay their pledges. By the end of May 2008, we had received annual campaign funds of $7.6 million. In 2009, we have received only $3.4 million for this same period, meaning we are already short $4.2 million in 2009. How can we project what our 2010 annual unrestricted revenue from UJC will be given current data?

The answer simply is we cannot. Last week, in order to ensure our fiscal stability, I met with my senior Hanhalla staff and spent a day developing various scenarios of funding and—based on the goals outlined in the Board-approved Strategic Visioning Report—discussing what programs can be reduced, eliminated or suspended. We also discussed where additional revenue may be found. All program areas were on the table.

The next step will be to meet with lay leadership to discuss and jointly develop options to take to the Board in October. Inevitably, 2010 will be a very tough year for JDC.

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Storahtelling to merge … but with who?

By Jacob Berkman · July 8, 2009

Storahtelling, the theatrical group that takes biblical stories and turns them into avante garde and sometimes risqué performance pieces, will be merging with an as-yet-to-be named organization.

I’ll have more in the next week or so when the group makes its full plans public.

But this week, the organization vacated its midtown Manhattan offices and put its stuff in storage until it formally joins the mystery group that is located downtown.

Storahtelling, which has been one of the most successful and well-regarded of the new generation of Jewish organization, along with J-Dub Records and Heeb Magazine, will downsize in order to grow, its founder and executive director Amichai Lau-Lavie told The Fundermentalist Tuesday.

“This was a reaction to everything going on,” he said, referring to the recession. “We are tactically thinking globally about what we can do.”

In recent years, the organization has been working on becoming an organization focused on creating innovative Jewish curriculum and teaching methodologies, and this merger will hopefully allow it to do so by finding a place where it can regularly perform instead of traveling constantly, while working on its teaching practices.

“We are focusing on having one stable headquarters where we perform consistently,” Lau-Lavie said. “We are saving office costs by finding a partner. We will work smarter together and we are modeling what we think is a sustainable way of doing grass roots outreach.”

The organization, which has roughly a $600,000 budget, laid off two staff members.

Look for an “Adapting to the Recession” piece about this when I find out more in the next few days.

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Remembering Gary Tobin

By Jacob Berkman · July 8, 2009

Ben Harris filed an obit about Gary Tobin yesterday afternoon:

NEW YORK (JTA) -- There are probably few students of American Jewry as comfortable arguing for more aggressive efforts to grow Jewish numbers through conversion as they are assailing the hostility towards Israel of reflexively liberal academics.

But Gary Tobin, who died late Monday at 59 after a long illness, was just that sort of thinker.

Trained as a city and regional planner at the University of California, Berkeley, Tobin first turned his attention to Jewish communal issues while a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He moved to Brandeis University, where he became a tenured professor and director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies before departing to start his own think tank, the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, in San Francisco.

“Gary was a visionary about the Jewish community,” said Leonard Saxe, a professor at Brandeis University who succeeded Tobin as director of the Cohen Center. “He identified problems and issues in the community and often developed these really creative analyses, whether it was about the role of synagogues or the makeup of communities and more recently about philanthropy.”

Lacking a background in sociology, Tobin often came at problems from a different perspective than many of the researchers who dominate the study of American Jewry.

While most communal professionals were bemoaning the loss of Jews to intermarriage and assimilation, Tobin assailed the community for its insularity and hostility toward converts and the gentile spouses of Jews. While Jewish organizations were complaining that wealthy Jews were directing their philanthropy to non-Jewish causes, Tobin told them to quit kvetching and give them a good reason not to.

Read the rest here.

Lynn Schusterman and the head of her foundation, Sandy Cardin, had this to add:

Lynn Schusterman, Chair, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation: Gary will be sorely missed. I will always remember and appreciate him for his friendship and for the good advice he gave Charlie and me when we initially decided to become involved in Jewish philanthropy in a serious way. Gary always treated us with dignity and respect, and the many contributions he made to the Jewish community he loved so dearly will be his legacy.

Sandy Cardin, President, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation: From my earliest days as a foundation professional right up until his death, Gary was someone I respected and admired for his intellect, insight and vision. He was one of the true pioneers in the fields of Jewish demographic and sociological research, and his large and rich body of work speaks for itself. Gary was a valued colleague who forced all of us to think more deeply about the challenges -- and opportunities -- that exist in contemporary Jewish life and especially on college campuses.

As for me, Gary was the guy who was most helpful to me when I started on this philanthropy beat. I can’t say that I knew him well in his personal life, but in my first couple of years at JTA I spent hours and hours on the phone with him picking his brain.

I can’t say that I agreed with him all of the time and sometimes felt that he was too harsh a critic of the Jewish establishment, but he always made me think and made me question what I was seeing on the surface of this Jewish philanthropic and organizational landscape. And in the end I usually ended up seeing his side of things. He never let anyone off the hook, and I wish that there were more Jewish sociologists like him.

But for me, this piece that TObin wrote for JTA in the days before the UJC's General Assembly in 2007 was Gary Tobin – and it really pissed off the UJC:

North American federations could and should be doing much better than they are. They matter. They are important. They embody the ideas of community, common cause and the ability to respond to collective concerns. They are vital institutions and we want them to succeed.

Federations have been the hub of a vast system that involves community centers, family services, bureaus of Jewish education and so many more organizations. But this system is becoming unglued and changes need to be made.

This call for action comes from someone who has worked for three decades with more than 70 federations, including New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Baltimore. I have worked as a consultant with the Council of Jewish Federations, the United Jewish Appeal, and scores of constituent and beneficiary agencies. I believe that federations are essential.  I don’t have all the right answers. But I think I have some of the right questions.
Telling the truth about endowments.

Endowments are a big federation success story, but trouble is bubbling both on and below the surface. Many federations proudly promote the size of their endowments, noting how much money is under federation management. Is it real? Touting an amazing growth of funds under the federation roof paints a not-quite-honest picture.

During the week of shiva for Gary Tobin, the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at New York University will be feature Tobin’s work on its homepage.

Just one request, Gary... If you run into the Annenbergs up there, could you ask them to steer their foundation trustees toward more Jewish causes? 

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Hebrew schools: Market solutions needed

By Ami Eden · July 8, 2009

Jonathan Woocher, chief ideas officer at JESNA (Jewish Educational Service of North America) and director of the Lippman Kanfer Institute, says Jewish educational institution need to adopt a more market-driven philosophy aimed at offering more options to families:

... Nonetheless, the vast majority of the efforts we have seen thus far suffer from one serious limitation: they start with the producers of supplementary education, not its consumers, as their primary focus.

Here’s why this is a problem: The “market” for Jewish education today is diverse and growing more so. Research confirms that parents want to be active choosers of the type of Jewish education their children will receive. The current system provides some options, but not enough. The main choice is between full-time (day school) and part-time (supplementary) Jewish education. There are many synagogues offering supplementary programs, but they tend to cover a pretty standard curriculum (holidays, Torah study, prayer, Jewish values, some history and rudimentary Hebrew) in roughly similar ways.

For the most part, these programs occupy a relatively narrow niche -- one that serves well an important segment of the overall potential market for Jewish education, but still leaves substantial populations that are either poorly served (the education doesn’t really match what they seek) or unserved altogether (a significant number of children get no Jewish education at all).

Take a day school family now seeking an intensive supplementary program, perhaps one that meets eight or 10 hours per week, rather than the typical four or five, and that emphasizes serious Hebrew literacy, either for purposes of conversation or text study in the original. Or, take a very different, but not uncommon family whose Jewishness is primarily cultural, not religious, or focused on social justice and activism. Perhaps the family has a child who is passionate and gifted in the arts and wants to approach her or his Jewish learning through this lens. Perhaps the family is an interfaith one, and seeks a Jewish educational program that is uniquely sensitive to their life issues.

With effort, some of these families might be able to find a suitable supplementary program. But wouldn’t it be far better if they didn’t have to work so hard? What it would take is an approach to providing supplementary education that is market-driven and community-coordinated.

Read the full story.

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