Check out my story in today’s JTA about the North American Jewish community’s outpouring of support for Haiti.
I’ll get you started:
NEW YORK (JTA) — The Haitian earthquake has been a major fund-raising boon at the Krieger Schechter Day School in suburban Baltimore.
The Jewish elementary school normally collects about $200 per week from its 420 students, and the money goes to various charities. But when the school’s headmaster, Paul Schneider, decided to direct last week’s giving to the American Red Cross to help the Haitian relief effort, the weekly tally jumped to $4,600.
“A fair amount of it was from children cracking open their piggybanks,” Schneider told JTA.
Over the past week, the American Jewish community has cracked open its collective piggybank as Jewish organizations small and large have raised millions of dollars to help in the relief effort following the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shattered Port-au-Prince last week, killing an estimated tens of thousands in Haiti.
Dozens of Jewish organizations from the Reform movement to the Orthodox Union have set up links on their Web sites for constituents to donate money toward the relief effort.
Most have directed their giving to the American Jewish World Service and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee — two U.S.-based organizations that do work in the developing world — or to IsraAid, the Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid, a coordinating organization for 17 Israeli and Jewish humanitarian groups that has sent a team of rescue workers to Haiti.
As of Tuesday morning, AJWS had raised an estimated $2.4 million to distribute to the grassroots economic development organizations it already works with in Haiti.
The JDC, the foreign aid agency backed by the Jewish Federations of North America, has brought in nearly $1.5 million that it will direct to the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief, which is sending money to the Israeli field hospitals in Haiti.
To read the rest, click here.
If you’re looking for places to give, here are several of the organizations already with contacts working on the ground:
- The American Jewish World Service
- The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
- ZAKA
- IsraAID
- Chabad
- Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross
(Before the PR folks from the alphabet soup of Jewish organizations jumps on me for not listing every organization that has a link to one of these groups, let me explain. I did not your specific group because it made more sense to allow donors to go right to the source. Remember. This is about collecting money for Haitian relief, and not about doing PR for your organization. If I missed any group that is on the ground or working outside of these aforementioned groups, let me know.)
