Irving Kane, president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, suggested today that the American Jewish community should look into new forms of fund raising to supplement existing annual campaigns for financing Jewish voluntary organizations.
Addressing the biennial convention of the National Jewish Welfare Board, Mr. Kane declared: “We shall have to ask ourselves whether it is enough to rely on our annual fund-raising campaigns, or whether we do not have an obligation to seek out endowment funds and special funds so that we do not live from annual emergency to annual emergency but can engage in long-term planning for the Jewish population.”
Asserting that “the financial burden for needed services will not be diminished in the decade ahead, ” the CJFWF president said that overseas need has accounted for about 60 percent of Jewish federations’ budgets in recent years. He added that in the future, Jewish federations in the United States “will continue to have a tremendous task in providing funds to take up the backlog which exists for the absorption of immigrants already in Israel.
“We have had our high excitement in recent years of bringing to Israel thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe, North Africa and other areas, ” he said. “This has been succeeded by the grim task of paying the bill. Our welfare funds and the Jewish Agency have had to go to the banks to provide funds when they were needed at the peak of need and now the accounts fall due. “
He said that in about three years, when the West German reparations agreement ends, Israel “will be confronted with the problem of having to find a substitute for $70,000,000 to $80,000,000 per year which it now receives in reparations. In effect, the Jewish agencies largely supported and financed through our federations and welfare funds will have a direct foreseeable loss in income of about $18,000,000 a year.”
He noted that on the American scene changing populations and changing needs were requiring construction of communal service buildings with capital and maintenance needs which were rising faster than the rate of income to meet them.
“We have urgent need to increase Jewish federated financing with Community Chests and United Fund campaigns, ” he asserted.” There will be a need of greater income in fees from users of these services, greater extension of government responsibility for building construction and for services and further extension of insurance programs, such as Blue Cross.”
He urged a “more intensive and effective planning and financing” on a metropolitan basis. He predicted that requirements of national Jewish organizations in the United States “may receive increasing recognition in the decade ahead.”
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.
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.
