A record total of more than $4 million was pledged here tonight at a dinner inaugurating the 50th anniversary year of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York toward a record-setting 1967-68 campaign for $27 million. The dinner honored Allan D. Emil, who served as maintenance fund chairman for the past two years.
The total, the largest amount ever raised in a single evening for maintenance of privately-sponsored New York health, welfare and community agencies, was pledged by some 300 community leaders who heard Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller stress the continuing and expanded need for such support for health and welfare programs despite increasing government outlays in this field.
Samuel J. Silberman, federation president, and George H. Heyman, Jr., maintenance campaign chairman, said success of the campaign was essential to assure that the federation’s 130 medical centers, hospitals, family, youth, child care and welfare agencies, homes and services for the aged, community centers and other programs would meet “the desperate needs of more than 1,350,000 New Yorkers of every faith and race served annually by federation agencies.”
ADDITIONAL FUNDS NEEDED TO COVER WIDE RANGE OF EXPANDED SERVICES
The federation leaders listed the planned uses for the additional funds. These include provisions for sick aged persons now waiting up to 18 months for residential care; more day and residential care units for emotionally disturbed children’ guidance and employment help for nearly 5.000 persons who cannot now be helped; aid to drug addicts who, though they need immediate help, must now wait 18 months or more; more camps for thousands of the aged, the Orthodox and the handicapped; more homemakers for the one of every three families who need and cannot get homemaker service in emergencies; more life-saving equipment for hospitals and community center facilities for 28,000 men, women and children currently denied membership.
Mr. Silberman told the donors that in the past 50 years, the federation “has helped raise $1.5 billion to aid an estimated 40 million people and has expanded from 24 charter societies to 130 major service groups.”
Mr. Heyman declared that “the impatience of our less affluent citizens at the failure of our system to work its wonders for them, and their consequent mood of helplessness and despair, constitute the most menacing forces on the horizon,” He warned that “we are running a life-and-death race against the onrushing forces of social needs which threaten to engulf us before we can arrange their solution.”
Mr. Heyman asserted that the role of the federation in helping to resolve this problem must be to “offer bolder and more imaginative programs of social service, probe deeper into the nature of human problems and pioneer in the development of effective services and programs designed to deal with the growing complexity of man’s environment and its constant maladjustments.”
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.
