Behind the Headlines; Federation Loan Program Continues a Long Tradition of Jewish Giving

When American Jewish federation leaders gave their approval last week to an innovative $900 million loan guarantee program to assist Soviet Jewish immigration to Israel, some saw it as a bold departure from past fund-raising practices.

For the first time, federations would be lending money to Israel rather than raising whatever amount is needed.

But while the type of outlay may be different, the loan program is, in fact, just a new phase of a long tradition of Jewish philanthropy to Israel.

In backing a program to aid the projected 1 million Soviet Jews who will have arrived in Israel by the end of 1993, the organized American Jewish community has followed an age-old tradition of aiding Jews in distress.

That is a fund-raising theme with special meaning in the post-Holocaust era, say scholars of American Jewish history and philanthropy.

“We’re talking about the possibility of resettling 1 million Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel, and for many Jews, it is an opportunity to redress the omissions of the past,” said Gary Tobin, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University.

“I don’t think there is going to be another American Jewish community in this century that stands by and abandons a European community,” Tobin said, referring to the annihilation of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

“It has that level of emotional appeal,” he said. “Many feel they didn’t do enough to rescue European Jewry.”

RESPONDING TO INCREASED DEMAND

Last year, the American Jewish community raised a whopping $420 million in the United Jewish Appeal’s special Operation Exodus fundraising campaign for Soviet Jewry.

It was initially thought that this amount, together with $180 million raised in other Diaspora communities, would meet resettlement needs for the next three to five years.

But close to 200,000 Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel last year alone in what has turned out to be the Jewish state’s largest single aliyah ever.

The overwhelming number of Soviet Jews flocking to Israel wiped out cost projections, forcing a radical rethinking of Israel’s financial needs.

Responding to the increased demand, Jewish federations in the United States will soon embark on a new $450 million UJA fund-raising campaign, which will work in tandem with the loan program the federations approved April 16.

For Jews, charitable giving, or tzedakah as it is called in Hebrew, is less an optional activity than something that is expected, as stated in Jewish literature dating from the Bible itself to modern-day UJA advertisements.

Israel has historically been an important recipient of this aid.

But it was only with the onset of World War II that American Jewish philanthropy started to become Israel-centered, a tie that strengthened when Israel’s survival was perceived as being threatened, said Steven Cohen, a professor of sociology at Queens College.

After Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel became “the No. 1 mainstream philanthropic cause for American Jewry,” said Cohen.

Cohen and others who study the issue say American Jews tend to show their support for Israel through their pocketbooks, rather than by making aliyah.

CAMPAIGNS SWELL IN TIMES OF CRISIS

“American Jews are pro-Israel, but they are, by and large, not Zionists in the classical sense of the word,” said Cohen. He defined classical Zionism as a belief that Diaspora Jewish life is “unhealthy, untenable and insignificant.”

Most American Jews see Israel as “a place of refuge for Jews, as a source of inspiration,” he said.

In times of external threat to the Jewish state, such as the wars of 1967 and 1973, American Jews have significantly increased their contributions to UJA.

In 1967, UJA raised $303.4 million, more than double the $125 million it had raised the year before, according to UJA campaign material.

Although post-crisis campaigns did not maintain the same level of generosity, the UJA campaigns never went back to the pre-crisis level, as if donors had suddenly gotten used to a new level of giving.

But some people involved in fund raising say the American Jewish community could do much better, especially when it comes to aiding Israel.

The question is “whether there is the capacity to do even more,” said Tobin of Brandeis. His answer: “I believe there is when the need arises.”

“For far too many people in America, the relationship (between Israel and the United States) is defined in purely dollar terms, and in the process, it has been insufficiently appreciated how few dollars end up” as a part of the Israeli budget, said Gerald Bubis, professor emeritus of the School of Jewish Communal Services at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.

Rabbi Brian Lurie, executive director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, calls Diaspora Jewish philanthropy to Israel a form of voluntary taxation.

But he adds that the amount is never as high as that paid through compulsory taxation on Israeli citizens.

THE ENVY OF OTHER PHILANTHROPIES

“I would like to believe that Jews in the Diaspora are as duty-bound as those in Israel, but somehow that hasn’t worked,” he said.

Lurie added that while the federation-backed loan program and fund-raising drive for Soviet Jews seems like a tremendous outlay, in fact it is less than 10 percent of the estimated $40 billion that Israel will need to fully integrate Soviet Jews into the economy.

Still, scholars of philanthropy and those directly involved say the American Jewish community has done an enviable job of organizing itself into a community that aids not only its own, but those outside, such as Soviet Jews.

“American Jewish philanthropy is the envy of the world in the sense that American Jews raise many times what other groups do and contribute many times over what other Americans do,” said Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.