New Professionals and New Philanthropy

June 29, 2009

One never knows what to expect on the 480 to Jerusalem. Today, an elderly woman seated in front of me had several telephone calls as the bus sped along Highway 1. She spoke with that wonderful, intelligent-sounding South African accent, switching between Hebrew and English, discussing her plans. She must have been asked where she was enroute, because she said, “where am I? Let me see. There are some hills and some trees.” This would have sounded o.k. with a U.S. southern accent, or a broken English accent, or in some language that I could not comprehend, or with an intonation that clearly suggested that she was joking, but that was not the case. She was serious. I wanted to call out the signposts that we passed, but I guess it would have indicated that I was eavesdropping. Finally, we passed the armored vehicles that memorialize the siege of Jerusalem during the War of Independence, a landmark that seemed to satisfy the person on the other end of the line.

I taught a class today at Hebrew University. Sheatufim sponsors a visitor from the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University to teach a 4 day, intensive course, for students in social work and public policy. I had corresponded with Professor Les Lenkowsky at Indiana about various philanthropic issues over the past several months, so he invited me to speak to the class to share some of my observations, but mainly to give the students a break from 7 hours of class with him each day. The group of 15 included students from the U.S. as well as Israel. While I was surprised at some of the basic information that they did not seem to know, such as assets-based versus deficit-based social services, they did ask good questions about my presentation. I discussed two interests of the U.S. Jewish community and raised questions about the barriers and facilitators of those interests by programs and agencies in Israel. One interest is in collaboration and partnership between Jews in the U.S. and Jews in Israel, as well as collaboration with any of the residents of Israel, not just Jews. The second interest is to enhance the capacity of Israelis and Israeli organizations to identify and address needs.

One of the first projects of the Center for Philanthropy at Sheatufim is the Cross-Border project. The goal is to bring together 10 philanthropists from the U.S and 10 from Israel, each committing $50,000 per year for two years, to identify a strategy or strategies that they would like to develop. Only three U.S. participants were able to attend and perhaps 7 of the Israeli participants. It’s a brilliant idea to bring together peers, colleagues, to discuss and learn from each other, while they make a social investment in the Jewish world, not necessarily limited to Israel. Ronny Douek is the force behind this endeavor. He hosted a dinner for those associated with the project at his seaside home in Beit Yannai, just north of Netanya. After the group of about 25 admired the glorious sunset over the Mediterranean, we sat down to a wonderful meal and stimulating conversation about philanthropy in Israel. We had a brief and somewhat uninspired presentation by the Minister of Social Welfare, Isaac Herzog, and short remarks by the head of the Rashi Foundation, based on the Perrier water fortune, one of the most generous supporters of work in Israel.