It’s that time of year again. My mailbox is filled to overflowing with solicitations from Jewish organizations of every stripe, seeking contributions for every conceivable cause.
It happens each High Holiday season.
Just as secular and Christian charities — Amnesty International, the Foundation Fighting Blindness, the United Way — deluge me with requests each December, the Jews do it before our new year.
Secular charities don’t hesitate to remind their mail recipients of the “season of giving,” and even though Jewish solicitors aren’t that overt in their mass mailings, that is what it’s really about.
Jewish tradition says that if God has written us into the book of the coming year’s plans marked for death, three things can avert the evil decree: repentance, prayer and charity.
And so the mail comes. From everyone. From more Jewish groups than I had any idea existed.
From the most massive, best-funded institutions that make up the Jewish establishment, whose leaders are frequently quoted in New York Times articles, to the tiny groups whose entire annual budgets are smaller than the cost of the huge organizations’ direct mail campaign.
I got my set of New Year’s cards, sent by UJA-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, in the hope that I’d return one of them to the charity with a check enclosed.
And that ubiquitous Orthodox yeshiva, the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland, which each December sends a slightly smashed box of Chanukah candles, this year sent a packet of New Year’s cards as well.
Envelopes clotting my mailbox arrive daily from organizations dedicated to working for their vision of tolerance and pluralism, and from those who work for what they say is the only authentic Judaism, a religion based on Torah truth as it was interpreted in the shtetls of Europe.
Sociologists may fulminate about it, and Israeli politicians may use the issue as a bargaining chip, but when it comes to collecting money, no group — even the most ultra of the ultra-Orthodox — gets too picky about defining “Who is a Jew.”
CLAL – The National Center for Learning and Leadership; the National Jewish Outreach Program; Agudath Israel of America; the Orthodox Union; the Reconstructionist movement; and the Jewish renewal-born retreat called Elat Chayim all mailed me entreaties for funding.
This year, stuffed between the magazines and catalogs, were sophisticated appeals from the Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I wonder whether there’s a Jew in America who doesn’t get their mail.
Then there were two different pitches from the Beer-Sheva Foundation, asking me to help support the poor, the elderly and recent immigrants in that southern Israeli town of 165,000 souls.
Perhaps the most interesting solicitation was from an Israeli organization named Just One Life, the Jewish version of America’s Right-to-Life movement.
Its anti-abortion brochure features gauzy pictures of fat and sassy infants and toddlers, overlayed by a quote from the Talmud: “He who saves Just one Life in Israel is as one who has saved an entire world.”
On the back of the brochure, the group lists its advisory committee members, including several teachers and high-ranking administrators from Bar Ilan University and a woman identified as a representative of Israel’s Ministry of Health.
Another envelope arrived, this one from the Jerusalem Shelter for Battered Women. It contained a Rosh Hashanah card with a black and white photo on the front of a young woman walking with her arms around four little kids, everyone’s arms intertwined in an embrace.
Inside is a note, in Hebrew and in English, wishing recipients a happy new year, and thanking supporters for pitching in after a fire destroyed one of the shelter’s halfway house apartments during the summer.
No direct pitch is made; on another little slip of paper it lists an address, should recipients want to send contributions.
The Great Charity Chaye Olam Institutions of Jerusalem, which supports “orphans, poor scholars and unfortunate children,” sent me a “complete Hebrew- English pocket calendar.” And when they say complete, they mean complete.
It lists the days of the week in numerals, Hebrew and Yiddish, and reminds its owner of the page of Talmud scheduled to be studied on that day.
It includes candle-lighting times for the New York City area, major holidays and minor fast days and a picture of the appropriate zodiac sign illustrating each month.
This is probably the only publication in the world that includes both the Yiddish language and a picture of a crab to illustrate July’s birth sign.
In the back are more than a dozen prayers, in Hebrew and English. You might expect it to include Kaddish, the prayer said in mourning, and the traditional traveler’s prayer, and it does.
This one also includes a special prayer to be recited when traveling by airplane, a prayer for success in life, a prayer of thanksgiving and faith, a prayer for peace and “a prayer when in deep trouble.”
I hope I don’t have to recite that one too many times this coming year.
But I guess that depends on whether I send the Great Charity Chaye Olam Institutions of Jerusalem a check.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
