Jewish groups are breathing a sigh of relief after Congress passed a law that saved them $150 million to $200 million.
President Obama on Aug. 10 signed into law a bill that extends relief provided by the federal government to individual states as part of the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, a part of the 2008 Federal Recovery economic stimulus package. The measure will pump billions of dollars into organizations that rely on payment from Medicaid.
The philanthropic world got a happy jolt when 40 members of the world’s wealthy elite — including 13 Jews — announced that they would give away more than half their money before they died.
The participating philanthropists were responding last week to a challenge issued earlier this year by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to their billionaire peers to donate more than half of their wealth in their lifetimes. Buffett and Gates called it the Giving Pledge.
But without any obvious signs of where their money will go, it’s unclear what impact this will have on Jewish nonprofits.
This is what we know so far about the Jewish giving of the Jews who have accepted the Giving Pledge, according to searches of their foundations’ 990 tax forms and media reports:
Michael Bloomberg: Already one of the world’s most generous givers, the mayor of New York City has been ramping up his charity in recent years. His foundation does not yet have 990 forms that show where his money is going, but according to a New York magazine profile he is a major donor to New York’s Jewish Museum.
“Being charitable is an important part of Jewish identity,” Joan Rosenbaum, director of the museum, told the magazine. “And Michael has been an extraordinarily generous supporter of the museum since 1988.”
Is it possible that the first iconic Jewish picture of the decade is of an interfaith marriage?
Photographs taken Saturday show the Jewish groom wearing a yarmulke and a crumpled tallit staring into the eyes of his giddy bride under a traditional Jewish wedding canopy with a framed ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, in the background.
The couple are Marc Mezvinsky, the banker son of two Jewish ex-members of Congress, and Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former U.S. president and current secretary of state.
After a death watch lasting nearly two years, news that the end of the American Jewish Congress was imminent set off a flurry of e-mails in the Jewish organizational world wondering if the nine-decade-old advocacy group indeed was shutting its doors.
News of the demise was posted last Friday by eJewishPhilanthropy.com, a Website focused on Jewish nonprofits.
“We have suspended most of our operations,” the organization’s co-executive director, Marc Stern, told JTA by phone last Friday, confirming that an organization that had been devastated by the Madoff scheme in December 2008 had laid off nearly all its remaining employees.
When the board of the American Jewish Congress decided to suspend its operations last week, it didn’t give its staff much notice.
Employees were notified on Tuesday, July 13, that Thursday, two days later, would be their last day and that they then would receive their final paychecks. Whereas those laid off in previous rounds of cuts received severance pay and compensation for accrued vacation, the employees who lasted till the last round were told they would not receive the same benefits at least until September.
Some employees who spoke to JTA on condition of anonymity are crying foul, saying the AJCongress still has money remaining from the 2004 sale of its building — an amount they believe adds up to about $2.5 million left in the bank — out of which the organization can pay the estimated $500,000 it owes employees.
Opponents of a controversial bill that could give the Orthodox rabbinate the final say over conversions in Israel are trying to keep the bill from moving ahead in the Israeli Knesset after its surprise introduction and passage by a Knesset committee.
For months, Israeli lawmakers have been discussing a bill that would put more power over conversion into the hands of Israel’s Orthodox-dominated rabbinate by giving local rabbis the ability to perform conversions and giving the Chief Rabbinate oversight and control over the whole process.
The bill, sponsored by Yisrael Beiteinu Knesset member David Rotem, gained steam Monday with its approval in the Knesset law committee by a 5-4 vote. The bill now must pass three readings before the full Knesset to become law.
NEW YORK – Joe DiMaggio, Yankee Clipper. Garrett Wittels, Jewish Hitter.
The first is an icon, the other started the 2010 college baseball season at Florida International University as a virtual unknown. Now both are inextricably linked to the number 56, and FIU is hoping to send Wittels’ popularity soaring with a grass-roots campaign to win him the ESPY award as male college athlete of the year.
Wittels, a 20-year-old sophomore, finished this season sitting on a 56-game hitting streak, the second-longest in college baseball history. The total matches DiMaggio’s legendary Major League record set in 1941, a mark that most baseball observers would say was even more impressive than his marriage to Marilyn Monroe (after all, two other men managed that feat).
The world’s largest breast cancer organization, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is partnering with Jerusalem, Hadassah: The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, health advocates, and scientists for a week of breast cancer-related events.
The Komen organization is launching the Israel Breast Cancer Collaborative, a partnership with nongovernmental organizations in Israel, to enhance advocacy, awareness, screening, and treatment of breast cancer in Israel during the week of Oct. 25 to 29.
A series of events will include a think tank on breast cancer, a mission to Israel, and Komen’s famed Race for the Cure, which will be held just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.
NEW YORK – Spurred by a major grant from one of the largest Jewish foundations, the rabbinical seminaries of three major synagogue movements are forging a groundbreaking partnership to train Jewish educators.
The Jim Joseph Foundation announced Monday that it was giving a combined $33 million to the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute for Religion, the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University, and the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
The grant is aimed at helping the three seminaries attract more teachers to the field of Jewish education and offer them better training.
