UJA Announces 1982 Campaign Goal of $660 Million; Calls for Intensified Project Renewal Drive

The United Jewish Appeal has established a national 1982 regular campaign goal of $660 million — matching the total raised in the 1974 campaign response to the Yom Kippur War — and called for simultaneous intensified fundraising and cash collection for Project Renewal.

The goal was announced by UJA national chairman Herschel Blumberg to 650 national, regional and community campaign leaders from throughout the country at the UJA national leadership meeting at the Sheraton-Washington Hotel. The meeting officially inaugurated the 1982 national campaign and initiated Blumberg’s second year as national chairman. The projected total for the 1981 campaign, still active and ongoing, is $550 million.

The meeting’s opening plenary was marked by the first public appearance in the U.S. of Yosef Mendelevich since his arrival in Israel after 11 years of imprisonment in the Soviet Union. The former Prisoner of Conscience urged reinforced support by American Jewry of the ongoing struggle of Soviet Jewish dissidents and refuseniks.

Ambassador Ephraim Evron of Israel, while making a brief, passing reference to differences with the Reagan Administration over specific current issues, affirmed the deep bond between the two countries. Addressing the crisis surrounding developments in Lebanon, he declared that Israel would “exhaust every diplomatic possibility” for a resolution before considering unilateral action.

CLAIM WALLENBERG IS STILL ALIVE

American policy in the Middle East was a major issue of concern at other events throughout the meeting, including briefings at the State Department, an analysis by Rep. Tom Lantos (D. Calif.), and a study session which also considered Reagan administration domestic policy.

Lantos, the only member of Congress who is a Holocaust survivor, revealed that his resolution to confer honorary U.S. citizenship on Raoul Wallenberg has received overwhelming support in both houses and is expected to be passed shortly. One of the 100,000 Hungarian Jews who was saved by Wallenberg’s heroic actions in the late stages of World War II, Lantos asserted that “conclusive proof now exists to support the belief that Wallenberg is still alive in the Gulag Archipelago.”

COMPREHENSIVE CAMPAIGN PLAN PRESENTED, STUDIED

A Comprehensive 1982 Campaign plan and calendar of events, presented by UJA national vice chairman Norman Lipoff of Miami, chairman of the National Campaign Planning Committee, was discussed and evaluated throughout the three-day meeting in an intensive series of workshops, seminars and study sessions.

For the second successive year, the new campaign will be supported by a “community capacity” campaign planning process carried out by a joint UJA/CJF Task Force. UJA national vice chairman Robert Loup of Denver, who heads the Task Force, reported that its members will conduct consultations with the leadership of some 80 federations throughout the spring and summer months to help develop campaigns with goals reflecting each community’s fundraising capacity, rather than past performance. In the Task Force’s first year of operation, Loup indicated, 48 communities accepted 1981 campaign capacity goals averaging a 21 percent increase over the previous year’s total and all are expected to meet them.

Martin Citrin of Detroit, the 1981 Task Force Chairman, called on community leadership to maintain equity in the proportionate allocation of campaign proceeds between UJA-funded overseas agencies and local beneficiaries. In reaction to impending cuts in federal funds for local programs, he emphasized, communities must find ways and means to maintain maximum service without reducing allocations to the United Jewish Appeal.

NEED FOR INTENSE CAMPAIGNS

Akiva Lewinsky, treasurer of the Jewish Agency, and Henry Taub, president of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, both said they were encouraged by increased percentage gains in the campaigns of the past two years but indicated that income derived from the campaigns had not kept up with rising costs.

Among the programs that would be most affected by campaign failure to meet the totality of need, Lewinsky asserted, are resettlement centers in the Negev for Sinai families who must be withdrawn behind the new border with Egypt next April. A drastic reduction in the number of teenage youngsters admitted into youth aliya residential training programs is likely, he added, while economic consolidation of agricultural settlements will be halted by diversion of funds to keep the pre-settlement plan in the Galilee alive.

Taub pointed to JDC’s successful open re-entry into Hungary and the recent reopening of contact with the Jews of Czechoslovakia as heartening gains, but pointed out that food and clothing distribution in other areas of Eastern Europe will have to be decreased unless there is a significant rise in campaign-generated income this year.

FISHER RECEIVES FIRST PINCUS AWARD

The UJA conferred its first Louis Pincus Jewish Statesmanship Award, established in memory of the former chairman of the Jewish Agency, on Max Fisher, chairman of the Agency’s Board of Governors for the past decade. Fisher, the only American Jewish leader to have served as the volunteer head of both the UJA and the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF), was co-creator with Pincus of the 1971 Agency reconstitution which augmented the role of diaspora campaign leadership in its operation.

Also, the UJA National Women’s Division conferred its second Adele Rosenwald Levy Award on Mathilda Brailove of Central New Jersey, one of the division’s founders and a past chairman and president.