In what may be an early vote of confidence by American Jews for Israel’s new Labor government, the United Jewish Appeal says it raised more money at a dinner with Yitzhak Rabin last week than at any other campaign event in its history.
Participants at the meeting with the Israeli prime minister pledged a total of $67.3 million to the continuing Operation Exodus campaign to finance the immigration and absorption of Jews from Ethiopia, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
A UJA spokesman refused to say how many people attended the event, citing fears that anti-Semitism would be stimulated if it was known just how many fewer than a hundred Jews it took to raise $67.3 million.
Both co-chairmen of the event, Charles Bronfman, co-chairman of the Seagram Co., and Leslie Wexner, founder and president of The Limited chain of clothing stores, are billionaires.
The new pledges announced Aug. 13 represent the second phase of the Operation Exodus campaign, which opened in early 1990 with a similar high-level fund-raising event, which brought in $58.1 million.
At that time, Operation Exodus was conceived as a three-year, $420 million campaign to bring in the roughly 200,000 Soviet immigrants then being expected.
The target has now grown to $1 billion, reflecting in part the unexpected cost of the mass airlift of more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews, the arrival of more than 400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union and the expectation that as many 600,000 are still to come.
The pledges read off in the presence of Rabin brought the total raised by Operation Exodus past the $800 million mark. More than half of that, $435 million, has been received as cash.
Earlier last week, a meeting between the prime minister and 40 top leaders of the State of Israel Bonds campaign enabled that organization to trot out its own set of encouraging figures.
The Bonds organization told Rabin that worldwide sales for this year have so far passed $750 million, or roughly the amount brought in during all of 1989.
Last year $993 million in bonds were sold, a record, and Bonds officials are optimistic that with results running 30 percent ahead of last year, they can achieve their $1.5 billion goal.
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