The Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City’s mission is to sustain and enhance Jewish life at home and around the world. It takes money to do that, which is why the Jewish Federation raises funds year round and makes annual allocations to fund a variety of programs locally and internationally. Representatives of two of those recipient agencies — the Jewish Agency for Israel and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee — were in town in mid-December to explain to leaders of the Jewish Federation what they are funding and why their donations to these agencies are vital to the welfare of Jews in Israel and overseas.
“I think our task is to assure the Jewish Federations that the funds they raise are being spent in the most effective, efficient and priority manner in Israel and around the world,” explained Michael L. Novick, executive director for strategic development for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
“The fact that we are here to meet with the leadership of the community and to provide depth to that hopefully builds a sense of confidence that the leadership will be inspired to raise more money,” Novick continued.
It’s a topic he and his colleagues can talk about for hours.
“The needs are compelling and hopefully these stories are inspiring and will help us garner greater support to meet those needs,” he noted.
Misha Galperin, president and CEO of international development for the Jewish Agency for Israel, said having enough funds to meet those needs has been challenging lately.
“Our partners at the Federations are trying very hard but there have been setbacks in the American economy,” said Galperin, noting that some communities have not yet recovered, “so we are certainly hurting.”
“We’re here not to ask for more but to help get more,” Galperin continued.
He and Novick believe that if potential contributors know more about the needs, and those they have helped, they will respond.
“We are the wealthiest, most influential, most powerful Jewish community in the history of our people. There are resources that are out there. Whatever money issues there are could be solved with the resources that are in the Jewish community and in Jewish hands. The question is how to motivate people so that they will actually respond. I think a lot of the work that we are doing trying to reconnect people to their Jewish heritage, to their Jewish values, to their sense of Jewish responsibility, is what could be inspiring to people and could bring them to do more than they have done and those that haven’t done maybe will begin to,” Galperin said.
The local Jewish Federation is proud to partner with the Jewish Agency for Israel and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, said Jessica Rudnick-Kaseff, the chair of Jewish Federation’s Israeli and overseas committee.
“We brought them here because we give so much of our core Israel and overseas dollars to these two agencies, that we felt this was a great time to have Misha Galperin and Michael Novick give us a better explanation of the good works they do and how they spend their funds. The more knowledge our board members and committee members have about what they do, and the more our community in general learns about what they do, the better we will be able to make informed decisions on how to best spend our money,” Rudnick-Kaseff said.
Derek Gale, Jewish Federation’s director of financial resources, added, “The information shared in their meetings with Jewish Federation leaders and benefactors is invaluable, and we appreciate their speaking on everything from Israel to the former Soviet Union, and from Europe to Venezuela,” Gale continued.
The agencies
JDC’s Novick explained helping Jews across the world is a process both agencies started to do together in 1939 when the United Jewish Appeal was created.
“The Jewish Agency and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee were the combined owners of that entity. This is not new, it has a long history,” he said.
The JDC, established in 1914 to aid starving Jews in Palestine and Europe during World War I, is now considered the world’s leading Jewish humanitarian assistance organization, impacting millions of lives in more than 70 countries. JDC leverages a century’s experience confronting poverty and crisis around the world to save the world’s poorest Jews, revitalize Jewish life, empower Israel’s future, develop tomorrow’s Jewish leaders and rescue victims of global emergencies.
JAFI is known for connecting Jewish people around the world with Israel, with one another and with their heritage. Since 1929, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been working to secure a vibrant Jewish future. It was instrumental in founding and building the State of Israel, and continues to serve as the main link between the Jewish state and Jewish communities everywhere.
Today, JAFI connects the global Jewish family, bringing Jews to Israel and Israel to Jews, by providing meaningful Israel engagement and facilitating Aliyah. The Jewish Agency continues to be the Jewish world’s first responder, prepared to address emergencies in Israel, and to rescue Jews from countries where they are at risk.
This summer’s emergency campaigns
Following Operation Protective Edge, both agencies needed additional funds to help those affected by the war. JAFI and JDC both provided programs to help the significant portion of the Israeli population, particularly the vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly and the disabled, living in the areas near the Gaza border who spent a considerable amount of time in shelters. For example, JAFI took 73,000 kids from within the 20-kilometer radius of the war zone out for respite for a day of actually being kids in the center of the country.
Among other things, Galperin explained, there was psychological trauma that needed to be dealt with.
We had people who were in absorption centers who just came from Ukraine who found themselves under fire,” Galperin mentioned.
JAFI also operates a Victims of Terror Fund, set up about 20 years ago.
“As soon as there is a victim in a family, within 24 hours we come and do assessments and help financially and provide for ongoing support and help the family if it needs it,” Galperin explained. The families of the victims of the terror in Har Nof qualify for this fund as well.
“It is certainly a case that we would work with. I can’t talk about individuals (such as KC native Kalman Levine’s family) but any victim of terror or war in Israel will fall under that umbrella and we do a very professional assessment of the needs — current, immediate and ongoing — and assist those people,” Galperin said.
Novick added that a variety of different issues presented themselves in the days after Operation Protective Edge. For instance JDC partners with the Israeli Ministry of Education in providing an array of services that seek to intervene when children coming back to school exhibit behaviors that indicate that they have suffered some degree of trauma.
“That can involve helping teachers and administrators to understand behaviors that might present themselves in the classroom or outside the classroom and then ways in which professionals, typically from the Israel Trauma Coalition, can intervene as partners in responding to whatever the issue is. It’s particularly relevant in the aftermath of this conflict because the rockets had such a broad reach, half the country was under fire. Even if the Iron Dome succeeded in intercepting 90 percent of the longer-range rockets, the fact is the potential is certainly there for trauma-related cases to present themselves once the kids go back to school,” Novick said.
Instability in Ukraine
Israel is just one part of the world that suffered turmoil in 2014. Ukraine is another. Novick pointed out that Ukraine has the fifth largest Jewish population of any country in the world, “somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 Jews live there based on our best estimates.”
While the conflict is limited to the eastern part of the country, the entire country’s economy has suffered, Novick said. The currency, hryvnia, has devalued from approximately 8.5 to the dollar at the beginning of the year to about 15.7 hryvnia to the dollar.
“If you’re living on a fixed income as the pensioners are, which we know there are thousands of Jewish families living in poverty, effectively their ability to buy what they need to support their families has been compromised by 50 percent in the last 12 months. The same is going on in Russia today,” Novick explained.
The average pension for those on fixed incomes there is equivalent to $150 a month. Novick said the purchasing power for that money has dropped to about $79.
“That makes it all the more difficult for them to buy the food they need, pay the utilities and pay for their medicines and it’s basically something that’s just not possible. They just can’t make ends meet,” he said, offering even more examples of the problems Jews are currently facing in Ukraine.
JAFI is also helping Ukrainian Jews — both the ones who want to stay there and those who want to immigrate to Israel.
“Since the beginning of the conflict, the number of people who are interested and want to leave for Israel has in some places gone up by 50 percent and others 400 percent. The total number (in 2014) will probably be in the neighborhood of four and a half to 5,000 people, which is more than twice of what it was last year,” Galperin said.
“In addition, the programs that the Jewish Agency runs in Ukraine, which has to do with helping connect young people with Israel and with their Jewish heritage such as the summer camps — we still ran all of the camps that we planned on except we moved many of them westward. We also brought two groups of kids to Israel for summer experiences instead of doing it in Ukraine,” he continued.
Among the stories Galperin told during his visit here was one about JAFI Chairman Natan Sharansky and a visit he made this fall to the Menorah Center in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, which has become the center for those fleeing the war zone — both Jewish and non-Jewish. While there Sharansky chatted with a man from his hometown of Donetzk.
As Galperin tells it, the non-Jewish man told Sharansky the way JAFI was helping Jewish people was unfair. Sharansky asked the man, what do you mean?
“The man said, ‘You are coming here and you are taking Jews to Israel.’ Sharansky then said why is that unfair and he said, ‘you’re not taking any of us. So we’re quite envious of the Jews because you have a state to go to, you have people that want to take care of you and this is not something we can get for ourselves.’ ”
Galperin ended the story with his own thoughts.
“I’ve got to tell you the experience of having Ukrainian nationalists be jealous of Jews and say that they wish they were is quite interesting,” said Galperin, who was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and immigrated to the United States in 1976 with his family at age 18.
