Local delegates laud this year’s GA
Jay Feinberg wins Jewish Community Hero contest
Tell-a-Friend
PrintJay Feinberg, founder of the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, has been tapped as the Jewish Community Hero.
The announcement was made Tuesday in New Orleans at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, which sponsored the online competition.
A panel of judges selected Feinberg, 42, of Boca Raton, Fla., from among five finalists for the $25,000 Jewish Federations grant awarded to the winner. More than 300,000 people cast online votes to determine the 20 semifinalists; the panel whittled the list to five before choosing Feinberg.
The other finalists — Mordechai Tokarsky, Dmitriy Salita, Stephen Kutner, and Zvi Gluck — will receive $1,000 Jewish Federations grants.
Candidates were nominated for their exceptional qualities and commitment in line with the mission of Jewish Federations, strengthening the Jewish community, and the ideals of tikkun olam, or repair of the world.
Feinberg founded Gift of Life in 1991 to search for a bone marrow donor after being diagnosed with leukemia, and found his match in 1995. He has developed the organization into a major public registry for bone marrow, blood stem cell, and umbilical cord blood.
Gift of Life is a world leader in its field, and has facilitated many life-saving transplants, particularly among those stricken with leukemia and lymphoma.
This was the second Jewish Community Hero campaign sponsored by Jewish Federations.
More on: Local delegates laud this year’s GA
As America’s 77 million baby boomers retire, they will place an unprecedented burden on the Jewish community’s infrastructure.
They will need more services, and many will want to become involved in a community that isn’t making room for them.
The federation system in particular needs to meet the challenge — now, as the oldest boomers turn 65 next year — or face losing the wealthiest and most highly educated generation in American Jewish history.
Those are two salient results of a study presented Monday at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America titled “Baby Boomers, Public Service and Minority Communities: A Case Study of the Jewish Community in the United States.”
Communal ties lacking for young Jewish professionals, study shows
NEW ORLEANS, La. – A new survey shows that younger Jewish professionals are less committed to the Jewish collective than their elders.
The results of the survey of about 2,500 self-identified Jewish community professionals were released this week in New Orleans at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America.
Most Jewish communal professionals grew up with two Jewish parents, had strong Jewish educational backgrounds, and spent time in Israel, noted sociologist Steven M. Cohen, who did the pro bono research for the project. He called those factors “strong predictors” of later Jewish engagement.
Lions roar in New Orleans
As the General Assembly got underway on Monday, so did the annual International Lion of Judah Conference, the federation system’s women’s philanthropic organization, with more than 1,100 “lions” from around the world.
With a theme of “We are, we can, we do,” the conference provided a rewarding opportunity for community service, said lion Gale S. Bindelglass of Franklin Lakes, who also co-chaired the UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey GA delegation.
NEW ORLEANS, La. – After three days of schmoozing, sessions, and feel-good speeches, the 3,000 or so Jewish federation officials who came to the annual General Assembly may have left New Orleans feeling invigorated.
The view expressed by many top officials was that after two years of a tough recession, the worst is over.
The federations collectively raised about $900 million through their annual campaigns in 2009 and, with two months to go in 2010, they have raised $750 million — within about 4 percent of where they were last year at this time, according to the treasurer of the Jewish Federations of North America, Michael Gelman.
Volunteers fly south ahead of GA
“People who go down to New Orleans and stay in the tourist area will think that the city has come back and is looking terrific,” Goodman said. “And it is, it’s really exciting to see how much of the downtown has come back. A lot of people don’t get the opportunity to travel into the neighborhoods we go into, to see the work that still needs to get done.”
The Klene-Up Krewe split into two groups in St. Bernard. Some worked on rebuilding homes for people who could not afford to rebuild after Katrina or have been cheated by contractors, while others went to work clearing plots of land the St. Bernard Project received in the Ninth Ward to build new homes.
Thousands of Jewish communal leaders from around the world gathered earlier this week in New Orleans for the annual General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, the biggest pow-wow of Jewish leaders in the world.
UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey sent a 17-member delegation, led by co-chairs Gale S. and David Bindelglass of Franklin Lakes. The event was headlined by speeches from Vice President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who both spoke of the strong U.S.-Israel relationship, but the conference centered on cultivating the next generation of Jewish leaders, and the local participants felt the push to get the younger leaders involved.
“The real focus of this year’s GA was on youth, the next generation,” said Alan Scharfstein, president of UJA-NNJ, who noted that more than 700 college students attended the conference through Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. “It was the youngest GA that I can certainly remember.”
