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US Jewish social service agencies and nonprofits say they expect this week’s string of bankruptcies, buyouts and takeovers on Wall Street to severely cramp their end-of-year fund-raising as individuals curtail their donations and whole companies suspend their philanthropic programs.
Officials at the UJA-Federation of New York, which supports 102 social service agencies in the New York area, told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday they were particularly anxious about the fate of Neuberger Berman, a subsidiary of Lehman Brothers whose executives have historically contributed a significant proportion of the approximately $42 million raised annually from Wall Street.
“They’ve been longtime supporters of UJA and the State of Israel,” said Paul Kane, a vice president of financial resources. “Now we’re in a very tricky situation, because we know there are people who won’t be able to give to us this year and at the same time we know there’s a huge cut in state budgets.”
Neuberger, a mutual fund management company acquired by the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers in 2003, continues to operate as executives try to negotiate a sale.
Before its sudden collapse this week, Lehman Brothers was a generous corporate benefactor to an array of charities, from the Robin Hood Foundation that fights poverty in New York City to the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Aleh Negev rehabilitation center near Ofakim.
“This is just a crazy time,” said Marc Friedman, an executive at Building with Books, an after-school program that held a regularly scheduled board meeting last week at Lehman’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan, days before the firm’s demise
His organization may be cushioned by the fact that Lehman Brothers’ donations were channelled through an independent foundation. Nonprofits that benefited from the largesse of the world’s largest insurer, American International Group, which was taken over late Tuesday by the US Federal Reserve, may not be so lucky: Its giving, to a variety of microfinance and education-focused organizations, came directly from corporate coffers, which are now frozen.
Officials said individual and corporate giving fell in 2001 after the September 11 attacks, but among Jewish donors the second intifada spurred a level of contributions to causes benefiting Israel that is absent this year.
“We got hurt then on the annual campaign, but we raised more money than we ever had before for Israel,” said Kane, of UJA.
He said donors whose jobs were secure had offered matching grants this year, and plans were being drawn to host Wall Street job fairs and find ways for financial professionals who had lost their jobs to contribute their time instead of money.
The squeeze on private giving exacerbates looming cuts in public funding, especially for Jewish social services agencies that typically get at least a third of their budgets from state and federal programs. New York Gov. David Paterson has estimated that the state may lose as much as $1 billion in tax revenues as a result of the Wall Street chaos.
“There’s an enormous loss of tax revenues if these companies close or leave town,” said Mimi Abramovitz, a professor of social policy at Hunter College’s School of Social Work, part of the City University of New York.
“So these agencies won’t disappear, but they’ll have to tighten up who they serve and how they give,” Abramovitz said. “It’s grim all over.”
One such agency, the Jewish Association of Services for the Aged, already anticipates cutting its budget as much as 6 percent for this year, limiting the assistance the agency will be able to give to programs that go beyond the basics of providing food and heat for the winter.
“There are seniors in the city who will suffer,” said Aileen Gitelson, JASA’s CEO.
“We still can’t quantify what it will mean this year, because we still have our Hanukka appeal, and it’s hard to know how many jobs will be lost, what’s going to happen with the city,” Gitelson said. “I just kind of feel this winter is a big question mark.”
Source – Jerusalem Post
An Islamic body organizing the high-profile international interfaith conference now underway in Madrid has a history of promoting Islamic law (shari’a) and religious intolerance.
Opening the three-day event in the Spanish capital Wednesday, Saudi King Abdullah called for reconciliation and an end to disputes among the world’s religions. Islam is “a religion of moderation and tolerance,” he said.
Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Hindu and representatives of other faiths are participating in the event, which many are calling historic.
Known as the World Conference on Dialogue, the gathering has been organized by the Mecca-based Muslim World League (MWL).
As Cybercast News Service reported recently, the Muslim World League has links to Islamic charities that are subject to U.S. government sanctions for clandestine funding of terror groups. Read the rest of this entry »
Conservative Jewish leaders are seeking to protect workers and the environment at kosher food plants such as the one raided by immigration agents this spring in Postville, Iowa.
They issued draft guidelines Thursday for a kosher certification program meant as a supplement to the traditional certification process that measures compliance with Jewish dietary law.
The proposed “certificate of righteousness” would be awarded to companies that pay fair wages, ensure workplace safety, follow government environmental regulations and treat animals humanely.
The stricter Orthodox Jewish movement oversees most of the kosher industry. Many of its leaders have criticized the Conservative Jewish proposal as unreasonable and unenforceable.
Source – cbn.com
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