The IDF medical team in Haiti was joined on Monday by nine volunteers from Los Angeles. IDF

The Haitian earthquake has galvanized fund raising 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 Websites 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. (For a list of resources, see page 22.)

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.

Lt. Col. Dr. Avi Abergel, a gynecologist with the Israeli aid mission to Haiti, holds a premature baby delivered in the IDF field hospital in Haiti on Sunday. IDF

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. The coalition is composed of some 30 organizations, including the Union for Reform Judaism, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, World ORT, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, AJWS and the American Jewish Committee.

While some relief efforts have been slow to reach Haiti in the aftermath of the quake, on the ground Jewish dollars already are at work. The AJWS says that all of the 10 organizations with which it normally works in Haiti are now in emergency mode and have shifted focus to help in the aid effort.

For instance, one AJWS-funded group in the Dominican Republic that normally focuses on helping Haitians in the Dominican Republic has formed a caravan from that country to Port-au-Prince to bring feminine hygiene supplies, diapers, and other needed items into Haiti.

Aside from providing funding for the Israel Defense Forces and IsraAid field hospitals in Haiti, which Israeli officials say can treat up to 500 patients per day, the money from JDC and the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief is going to organizations such as Heart to Heart International and Partners in Health to provide emergency medical supplies.

If past experience is any guide, some of the money the Jewish community raises in the coming weeks for Haiti relief will not be spent for months or even years. In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, B’nai B’rith International raised $900,000, which it spent on relief and rebuilding efforts over the next four years. Similarly, the JDC took five years to spend the $18 million it raised following the tsunami.

The immediate days following a disaster tend to be the most critical for fund-raising. About 90 percent of the $18 million the JDC raised for Southeast Asia was raised in the month immediately following the tsunami.

The president of AJWS, Ruth Messinger, said it becomes more difficult to raise money when the issue disappears from the headlines.

“This is when most people get alerted to the situation,” she said. “They want to know who is raising money and who has a plan for what is being raised and what they are doing and who can explain to us what is different and discrete about what we are doing.”

Meanwhile, organizations and donors large and small are pitching in. Billionaire George Soros, who is Jewish, gave $4 million to the relief effort through his Open Society Institute. The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring and the New Yiddish Repertory are organizing a benefit concert later this month with the goal of raising $20,000.

The swiftness of the response is due in part to the Internet and the flourishing of online giving.

By Tuesday, AJWS raised $1.8 million from more than 16,000 people via its Website. The JUF-Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago raised $283,000 in five days from 2,200 donors. Almost all of it — nearly $260,000 – came in online, from 2,058 individuals. UJA-Federation of Greater Toronto raised $173,240 so far, much of it online.

As of Wednesday, UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey had accumulated pledges and donations through its Website and by mail, amounting to more than $56,000, not counting several large gifts, one of $25,000. (See related story.)

Those involved in the fund-raising effort say the Jewish community’s gifts to the people of Haiti stem from Jewish values.

“Here is a vast group of people in desperate need, and we are committed to helping them, and in helping them we are bettering the world,” said the executive director of the Workmen’s Circle, Ann Toback. “It combines our cultural identity with our commitment to social justice and improving the world.”

Giving also provides a teaching opportunity, said the Krieger Schechter school’s Schneider.

“I think some of the older children understand what is happening in Haiti. I have talked to them about it. They are concerned. They wonder how these people are going to survive, what will they eat? Will they still be alive when someone finally comes to try to find them?” he said. “We talk to the children all of the time the importance of human life and ‘pikuach nefesh’” — saving lives. “The children know all human life is sacred, not just Jewish life. This is an opportunity to teach that.”

JTA

Pakistan has been devastated by massive floods. Peter Biro/International Rescue Committee

Nearly a month after pictures of Pakistanis wading through floodwaters began to appear on the front pages of newspapers worldwide, aid from Americans, including Jews, is beginning to arrive in the stricken country.

American Jews are now responding to the call to bring relief to the devastated area, where conditions have been growing steadily worse. The monsoon rains that flooded Pakistan’s northwest region about a month ago have killed more than 1,000 people, and millions more are estimated to have been left homeless. Roads and railways have been damaged, along with schools and other civic infrastructure. The impact on the country’s crops is still being calculated and could run into the billions of dollars.

The American Jewish World Service and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee each put out an appeal for donations last week.

The AJWS, which has been working with grassroots organizations in Pakistan for years and had raised $42,000 for the Pakistan effort by the end of last week, is delivering aid bags with food, water, pots, pans, and clothes to families in the region. JDC also has worked with Pakistan before — it responded to earthquakes that hit the region in 2005 and 2008 — and the organization has allocated $20,000 from its revolving disaster relief fund that it plans to use to distribute medicine and other supplies. It hasn’t yet raised enough to cover that amount, but officials hope to meet or exceed the goal as their campaign progresses.

“Checks take time to come in,” said Will Recant, assistant executive vice president in charge of international development at JDC. “Not everything is done electronically, and a lot of what we do is done through federations.”

The American Jewish Committee contributed an undisclosed amount from its humanitarian fund to the JDC effort, and a spokesman for the group said it is encouraging donors to give to JDC directly.

In light of the dire situation, Pakistanis likely wouldn’t object to receiving aid from the United States, wrote Aoun Sahi, a journalist in Lahore, Pakistan, via e-mail. “But there will be some problems with the word ‘Jewish’ if printed on clothing especially,” he wrote. “It will not be easy for them to accept aid from Jewish groups from Israel, but they will be OK with American Jewish groups’ aid.”

He added, “I think this is a good opportunity for different Jewish groups to establish links with some Pakistani groups.”

A spokeswoman for the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles said she knows of no aid that has gone from Israel to Pakistan during this crisis. Israel was widely applauded for its rapid response in providing aid and medical services in Haiti after the earthquake.

Though the Pakistani floods have been news for weeks, Jewish groups issued their call for donations only last week.

How much and how fast people donate can depend heavily on media coverage of a disaster.

“The biggest challenge right now is that this has been going on for two weeks, and the media is just now starting to pay attention,” AJWS spokesman Joshua Berkman said, adding that coverage of Pakistan’s floods has paled in comparison with the attention immediately given to the Haitian earthquake.

Larger, nonsectarian U.S. aid organizations are also reporting a slow response to the Pakistani flooding.

“Haiti is the obvious comparison. This response is far slower,” said Susan Kotcher, vice president for development at the International Rescue Committee. Kotcher said the IRC, which made its first calls to donors on July 29, is now getting hundreds of daily donations for Pakistan and has raised a total of $1.4 million from Americans. By contrast, in the first few days after the earthquake in Haiti, the group was getting thousands of donations each day, and raised more than $4 million in the first two weeks.

Some, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have attributed the slow response to the economic hardships facing Americans, as well as to a feeling of fatigue among donors who have contributed to other recent relief efforts. Others say the slow response may be caused by the fact that the devastation from floods, unlike that from earthquakes and tsunamis, develops over time.

“Its destructive power will accumulate and grow with time,” said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

But others suspect that political factors are at play. “I can’t help but have my suspicions,” said Edina Lekovic, communications director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. “The first media coverage that I saw about the floods had more to do with whether the victims were going to rely on extremist groups for aid and relief,” she said, referring to news stories reporting that Islamic charities with connections to terrorist groups were distributing aid to people in flood-affected areas. “That their basic humanity and suffering comes second to questionable aid sources is insulting, and misses the point.”

The slowness of the global response is also being noticed in Pakistan. “Many right-wing organizations have been raising their voices over the slow response of Americans to the disaster,” Sahi said. “Many of them have been comparing the response of Americans to the Pakistani tragedy with the one faced by Haiti, and have been trying to make it a religious issue.”

Asked what might account for the slowness of the Jewish response, Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Temple Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, Calif. said, “I don’t think that is an anti-Muslim deal. I think it’s a deeper question of overload” — too many issues to care about at once. American Jews are more concerned with existential threats being made against them by Iran, he suggested.

“If I’m scared that somebody is threatening me, I’m not going to listen to the cries of the neighbors,” Schulweis said. “That’s too bad,” he added, “because in the course of that parochialism, we lose one of the most uplifting values in Judaism itself, which is to be a light unto the nations.”

To help support the relief efforts in Pakistan, visit the websites of the JDC (jdc.org), the AJWS (ajws.org) or the IRC (theirc.org).

Los Angeles Jewish Journal

As the recession ends, will mega-donors like Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson re-up their Jewish giving? Courtesy Deborah Camiel

While economists say the recession ended more than a year ago, you wouldn’t know it to look at Jewish nonprofits.

In an annual list released earlier this month by The Chronicle of Philanthropy of the top 400 nonprofits in the United States, fund raising at the country’s largest Jewish charities had declined by an average of 18.5 percent in 2009 — nearly twice as much as the list as a whole, which showed a fund-raising decline of 10 percent.

Twenty-two Jewish organizations made the Philanthropy 400, which ranks the country’s 400 largest nonprofits by the size of their fund-raising totals.

Only two Jewish charities ranked among the top 100 earners in 2009, with the Jewish Federations of North America and its overseas partner, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, ranking 45 and 78, respectively.

Some of the country’s largest Jewish charities took significant hits. Hadassah was down 7.9 percent to $78 million; the JDC fell 8.5 percent to $224 million; Yeshiva University dropped nearly 40 percent to $111 million; and Brandeis University was down 12.6 percent to $78 million. On the other hand, the Birthright Israel Foundation rose 46.8 percent to just over $71 million.

It seems that 2009 was an especially hard year for the Jewish federation system.

The Chronicle’s accounting of the 147-federation system is always a bit tricky, as some of the largest federations are counted by themselves and not with the rest of the system.

According to the Chronicle’s survey, the JFNA brought in $320,252,000 in 2009, a 19.6 percent drop from the previous year (when it was known as the UJC, for United Jewish Communities).

All but one of the top federations on the list, which were counted separately, showed significant declines. The UJA-Federation of New York was down 10 percent to $159.7 million, JUF-Jewish Federation of Chicago was down 15 percent to $133.5 million, and the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston was down 21 percent to about $85 million.

Only the Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore saw an increase, gaining 10 percent to reach $62 million.

But the JFNA says the numbers for the federations are not as bad as the report may seem. Looking at the federation system’s campaign as a whole, and including the larger federations, the 2009 annual campaign stood at $938 million, a 10 percent drop from 2008’s $1.04 billion campaign and more in line with the national averages for declines.

In total, according to the JFNA, the federations took in $2 billion in 2009 when counting all of their assets, including endowments and foundations such as the Jewish Communal Fund of New York. This year, the federations are ahead of the 2009 pace, as they have taken in $747 million in 2010, a 3.4 percent increase over the same period of last year.

“There is a cautious optimism,” a JFNA spokesman said. “I don’t think anyone thinks we are out of the woods or that everything is great. But there is a feeling that people have really responded and stepped up to the plate, especially given that nonprofits and charities continue to be down. Our surveys have shown that there is a trust in the federation movement.”

On the positive side, two Jewish organizations were new to this year’s list of the top 400: American Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and the Jewish National Fund. On the other side, two Jewish organizations dropped off the list: the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego and the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest, N.J., both of which made the top 400 for 2008 thanks to significant one-time gifts.

This marks the 20th year that the Chronicle has conducted the survey. It provided an opportunity to see how top charities have evolved since 1991 and how donor interests may have changed.

In general, the largest charities have stayed relatively stable. Some 228 charities made the list in both 1991 and 2010, and they increased their mean fund-raising by 228 percent. When adjusted for inflation, they raised 81 percent more in real dollars last year than they did two decades ago. And the largest of the large have fared well, according to the Chronicle: Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Catholic Charities USA, the Salvation Army, and the Y (formerly YMCA) stayed in the list’s top 20, with each group at least tripling the amount raised over the two decades.

Still, the landscape has changed dramatically. Nearly half the list is new since 1991. Jewish charities have declined. In 1991, two Jewish organizations were in the top 10, but this year the top Jewish charity, the Jewish federation system, only made it as high as No. 45.

Paul Kane, who heads the JFNA’s development department and is the senior adviser to the CEO of JFNA, said federations expect better outcomes next year. So far, the JFNA has had three major campaign events, all of which are up on average 18 percent over last year.

“We’re going to do better in 2010 than in 2009,” Kane said, adding that 2011 should be another step toward recovery. “I think people are coming back financially and showing great commitment that could reach levels pre-2009 and higher.”

JTA

Another day here in this devastated village,” Dr. Ofer Merin writes from the Israeli-run emergency field hospital where he is working in tsunami-wracked Japan.

Merin, deputy director-general of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, is the head of surgical operations at the field hospital set up last week by the Israel Defense Forces in Minamisanriku, a town in the Miyagi Prefecture. Half of the town’s 17,000 residents were killed by the tsunami that followed the massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11.

The IDF flew in an aid delegation of 50 officers and soldiers, including medical personnel, civilian aid workers, and logistics experts, as well as a team from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, and immediately got to work helping victims in this hard-hit area where thousands of people are still missing or homeless. (Follow the delegation on Twitter.)

“We are seeing more and more patients,” Merin reports on the blog he is maintaining to chronicle Israeli medical efforts in Minamisanriku. “Physicians from all around are coming with their patients for consults with our specialists, for blood tests and X-rays. An elderly lady walked a long distance to reach us. These are facilities they simply don’t have.”

While Israelis provide medical help on the ground in Japan, American Jewish organizations have raised millions of dollars for the ravaged island nation. By April 1, the groups had brought in more than $2 million for Japan relief.

The Jewish federation system collectively has raised nearly $1 million for emergency aid — about $187,000 from the Jewish Federations of North America umbrella organization and some $680,000 from individual federations. The federations in Chicago and New York each raised more than $125,000; Toronto brought in more than $100,000.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, whose nonsectarian disaster relief programs constitute the primary overseas arm of federation efforts, has raised $1.4 million for Japan relief. The money is being used for equipment and medications at the IDF field hospital, as well as other essential services provided by agencies including the International Rescue Committee, which is sending food, fuel, and other emergency supplies to evacuation centers; JEN, a Japanese nongovernmental organization; UNICEF, which is handling children’s needs; and Chabad, which is providing food, water bottles, and baked goods in Sendai.

On his blog, Merin reported that the Japanese people are resistant to being treated by foreign doctors, but that victims started pouring in after the town’s mayor showed up as the clinic’s first patient.

The mayor, who suffered chest injuries from the tsunami, was examined by Dr. Ofir Cohen-Marom, commander of the IDF medical delegation.

Merin said that daily aftershocks from the quake continue to rock the area, “but like everything in life, you almost get used to them.” The hospital was established near the coastline but in an elevated area, he explains, so “if G-d forbid another tsunami will occur, it will not reach us.”

The IDF’s Home Front Command and Medical Corps, often the first to send aid delegations to disaster areas around the world, have filled key roles in more than 20 international aid efforts. They include medical care and search-and-rescue teams sent to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake; New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005; and Southeast Asia following the December 2005 tsunami.

To donate to Japan relief efforts, visit http://bit.ly/ifDJYB.

JTA Wire Service