The aftermath of Hurricane Ike and the rebuilding effort in Houston and Galveston have been lost in the media frenzy surrounding the economic crisis and the presidential election. Because of that, the fund-raising effort to help Texans has suffered, according to the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston.
“The fact of the matter is the hurricane got wiped out of the media because of what’s happened with the economy and the presidential campaign,” Lee Wunsch told The Fundermentalist. “But Houston is recovering, and there are still some issues in the metro area in terms of home repairs and other issues. And Galveston is still a mess. It reminds me of New Orleans after Katrina. And that story is not known.”
While Houston was in large part spared the mass devastation that some expected when the hurricane ripped through coastal Texas in late summer, Galveston was devastated.
Galveston, which has about 350 Jewish families, according to Wunsch, suffered serious damage to its Jewish infrastructure. The island town has two synagogues, and the Conservative one suffered “catastrophic damage,” he said. While the structure is in tact, the entire building has molded, and all of its contents, aside from its Torah scrolls, which were removed before the storm, are a total loss. The two Jewish cemeteries in the town also suffered heavy damage, with gravestones overturned.
Wunsch’s federation is working on an estimate for the cost of the damage to both Galveston and Houston.
But the call he and the federation’s umbrella organization, the United Jewish Communities, put out to the national Jewish community immediately after the hurricane struck has gone largely unanswered.
Wunsch said the UJC has been quite responsive and helpful, but in total only $50,000 has been raised through a mailbox UJC set up, and right now it seems like no one will be able to pay the reconstruction bill.
There is no fund-raising structure set up for the Jewish community in Galveston, Wunsch said, and there is no major benefactor to underwrite rebuilding the island’s Jewish infrastructure.
The Houston Federation simply is not in position to undertake the rebuilding on its own, he said.
The federation, which has an annual campaign of around $9.5 million and raises another $9 million to $10 million per year in supplemental gifts, has no reserves upon which to draw.
“We have no reserves,” he said. “This is a pretty typical large-intermediate community. We are new to the endowment business. And do not have money put away for this situation.”
And there is more bad news.
Houston’s economy had survived relatively unscathed over the past year by the softening national economy because the local economy is so heavily based in oil and energy. But even those sectors are not immune from the current economic meltdown, Wunsch said.
Houston’s Jewish social service organizations are now seeing clients who once were donors. They’re asking for help because they simply cannot pay for the repairs they need to make to their homes and businesses, Wunsch said.
This could foreshadow the serious fund-raising hit Houston’s federation may take in the coming months. The federation already has delayed the start of its 2009 campaign so that it can make an assessment of its needs.
Wunsch is in the process of meeting with 25-50 of the federation’s largest donors, who give between $50,000 and $400,000 per year to the federation, to ask them what they can give next year.
He has met half a dozen so far and has been told that their giving would not increase.
“It doesn’t bode well,” he said.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
