Storied L.A. Shul Thinks Big, Seeks $100 Million

The Wilshire Boulevard Temple is seeking to raise $100 million over the next few years to refurbish its historic sanctuary and build a sprawling campus that will serve as the hub for Jewish life on the city’s east side.

“This is the largest single synagogue capital campaign I have ever heard of by a magnitude of perhaps as much as two,” said David Mersky, a consultant to not-for-profit organizations who works regularly with synagogues on fundraising endeavors. “If the Wilshire Boulevard Temple campaign succeeds, what it will have done is said we have a role to play in the building of community and are worthy of philanthropic investments at a very significant level.”

from The Jewish Chronicle:

Charities join up to fight crunch

Charities are being forced to share their resources to save money as the credit crunch bites at the heart of their services.

from Jewlicious:

Get ready LA for Love Fest

Before speed dating, J-Date, Valentines Day or Sadie Hawkins Day, there was the original ancient Love Holiday -Tu B’Av. Jewish maidelach and suitors went out into the fields to see and be seen, really, the first Jewish singles event.  It’s a celebration of love for everyone.

from Haaretz:

Jewish bloggers to gather in capital

While some influential bloggers scorned the First International Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem as one-sided and agenda-driven, the organizers maintain that not only will many attend the event physically, but hundreds more will join from in front of their computer screens.

“The response has been tremendous, already 200 people signed up to attend the conference,” said Danny Oberman, vice president of Israel Operations for Nefesh B’Nefesh, which is organizing the event. He added that an additional 200 bloggers have signed up on the group’s Web site to view the live webcast of the August 20 meet and to join conference discussions via an Internet chat room…

Nefesh B’Nefesh denies any bias in its selection process. “The First International Jewish Bloggers Convention is open to the entire Jewish world,” the group’s director of communications, Yael Katsman, said yesterday. “All official bloggers are welcome and invited to join. We don’t have a prerequisite - if you’re Orthodox or not, if you are on the right or left-wing, it doesn’t matter.”

Katsman noted that a number of blogs whose authors are scheduled to participate in the panel discussions are “completely secular.” The fact that all participants have to register is standard for international conferences and merely serves to ensure that only Jewish bloggers can participate, she added.

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One of the many projects incubated this summer at the PresenTense Institute, Shomer Achi is an international organization that acts to strengthen Jewish identity and Jewish unity by fostering sustainable and community based connections between Israeli and American Jewish college students through parallel social service initiatives, dialogue, and leadership training.

In the words of co-founders Jodi Mererowitz and Jamie Zebrak:

“Shomer Achi presupposes an urgency to shift the Jewish self perception. For too long, true dialogue and understanding has been stifled by pre-existing modalities that limit the scope of the Jewish experience. America has either been the generous donor of aid to Israel or Israel has served as protector of disenfranchised Jews worldwide; a hierarchy of power that has served as the only framework within which Jews in Israel and the Diaspora have cooperated.

It is time for us to explore a world in which Jews everywhere can work together and contribute to one another. Our communities are able to cooperate as equals adding mutually to the greater goal of facilitating and enhancing the Jewish experience. Shomer Achi does not suppose that Israel now needs to ‘take care of’ America or that America needs to be the beneficiary of Israel. It is necessary to switch our understanding of how Jews worldwide can move forward and achieve greater cohesiveness as a people.”

Shomer Achi already has a pretty impressive list of partners, including B’Tzedek and Haifa Hillel, along with a few long-time and well known communal names on their advisory board. I have a hunch we will be hearing a great deal more from these two young women.

Not only are Jodi and Jamie Cool People, they’re people to watch!

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As Jewish presence and wealth grow in China and the Far East, Israelis mine philanthropic gold

With the U.S. economy faltering and nonprofits scrambling to meet their fundraising goals, an unexpected source of philanthropic dollars is emerging: Jews in the Far East.

Expatriates from Israel and several Western countries, usually successful businesspeople and high-tech specialists, are moving to places like China, India and Singapore in increasing numbers. In the region, whose total Jewish population numbers about 10,000 (China’s is by far the largest), members of the community are establishing a network of religious and cultural organizations there, and supporting Jewish causes back home, especially in Israel…

“It’s certainly not surprising to see that Jewish philanthropy is going there,” said Jeffrey Solomon, president of Andrea and Charles Philanthropies. “Where there is economic opportunity, very often Jewish entrepreneurs follow.”

Solomon calls this part of the “globalization of philanthropy. As wealth is spreading, philanthropy is spreading.”

image: Shanghai Jewish Center

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The Jewish Salons is a project intended to build a network of groups of young Jews from different communities, starting with Europe and Latin America. Each group in a given community will work to produce Jewish cultural events on a regular basis in chic and aesthetic venues, combining local and international thorny Jewish cultural content in interactive ways. The building of the programming for each event will be done through a global e-mail dialogue directed by one global cultural director. The gradual results will culminate in all these groups sharing their community’s local Jewish cultural scene with other groups in the Jewish Salons network of communities.

The idea of the Jewish Salons shaped up in my mind as a result of the KolDor experience. The physical meeting with young Jews from different places and Jewish communities around the world made me aware of an important phenomenon – the diminishing interest most young Jews have towards their Jewish identity. The Jewish Salons were created to challenge this phenomenon. At KolDor’s birth at the Sde Boker conference I met some lifelong friends and our friendship has revealed to me what it is to be Jewish today, when one is not Israeli. It’s different to be Jewish in Los Angeles than to be Jewish in Paris or Bucharest, but each of these identities in one way or another are different from that of being an Israeli Jew. KolDor friends from small communities, like the ones in Europe and Latin America, spoke of the limited options for them to engage with communal Jewish activity, finding the institutional circles, whether religious or Zionist, unappealing or unattractive. In cities like New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Paris or London this may be less of a problem AS there is enough of a variety of non-institutional Jewish cultural stuff. In Rome, in Amsterdam, in Budapest or in Mexico City it is tougher to be Jewish; in those places, the Jewish community is like a kibbutz and if one is not into the institutional activities, one is pretty much on his own. By meeting Diaspora Jews “from the rest of the world” - the term that was used for the first conference participants who were not Israeli or Americans - I learned of their isolation from the Israeli-American dialogue that dominated Jewish life in the second half of the 20th century and felt that the creation of the Jewish Salons project could start to address this.

posted with permission of KolDor

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Mobile giving, the act of donating to a cause through one’s cell phone, is the newest thing in philanthropy.

Spurred by the Millennial Generation (born 1982-2002), mobile giving is taking off. The technology has advanced to a simple system, and the largest U.S. providers of cell phone service have agreed to include these small donations (usually $5 or $10) on their customers’ cell phone bills without any additional charge.

take a look: Recently, Alicia Keys went on a concert tour. During her performances she played a video from her film, made during a recent tour of that continent. Then, Alicia asked concert goers to pull out their cell phones and text the word “ALIVE” to a particular number. More than 8,000 people did so right at the concerts, raising more than $40,000 to fight AIDS. Alicia said about her campaign, “Texting can provide a way to give at that instant when we are moved, rather than later when life takes over.”

Read more from about.com

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Take a read through these comments; but in any case, obtain your own legal advice on the subject.

Even without trying, foundations can violate the law and get into trouble if they are not scrupulous in disbursing funds. Two areas that frequently cause trouble are grants to individuals and grants to organizations that are not charities.

Kelly Shipp Simone, senior staff attorney for the Council on Foundations, during a recent conference offered a look at the details of foundation grants to individuals and to non-charities.

Both types of grants are allowed, but they must meet certain very strict criteria. The following items are of note for grants to individuals:

• They must further charitable purposes.
• No grants may be given to disqualified persons.
• The most common grants to individuals are study or travel grants. They must be in the charitable class, objective and nondiscriminatory and meet pre-approval of process.
• Disaster relief grants to alleviate poverty do not require pre-approval.
• An organization considering a grant to an individual should check its governing documents.

Regarding grants to organizations that are not charities:

• A foundation can make a grant to an organization that is not a charity as long as the grant is for charitable purposes.
• The safest grants are to IRS-recognized organizations.
• “Expenditure responsibility” requires a pre-grant inquiry, a written agreement, funds held separately by the grantee, regular reports from the grantee and summary status on Form 990-PF.

courtesy The NonProfit Times

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• Video is Bigger Than Search: 12 billion videos are watched per month vs. 10.5 billion searches conducted.
• Video Consumption is Quickly Moving Online: 19% of total video consumption is now online, versus 11% a year ago.
• Most Users Consume Video: 80% of Internet users watch video, moving to 88% by 2012.
• Consumption is High Across All Demos: 76% of children and 44% of seniors watched online video.

Still not convinced you need video on your non-profit’s website?

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This week I am writing from upstate New York (and when I say upstate, I mean the Adirondacks, not Poughkeepsie). But in the past day or so I have received several emails from friends from Atlanta and elsewhere in Jewish America asking, “Why am I not here?”

Where is the “here” they are speaking of?

Scottsdale, Arizona, This year’s location for the yearly summer gathering of UJC Young Leadership Cabinet.

No thank you – at least not for now.

Now to be clear, I believe there is value in the Federation system (see my prior posts on the topic) and I believe bringing young leadership together to meet, connect, learn and discuss the future of the Jewish people is an important effort that we should be undertaking constantly. Unfortunately, I think the way Cabinet is currently structured falls far short in reinforcing its value to the Jewish people and unlocking the value in its participants.

So what would I do to fix it? A few thoughts.

Participants.  One thing that I think UJC needs to do to make Cabinet a more meaningful convergence of national young leaders is to open up the way UJC defines those young leaders in the first place. Right now, the criteria to attend/participate in Cabinet is a substantial commitment to Federation campaigns and a demonstration of leadership ability within the system. While criteria is different in various communities and the ‘Cabinet brand’ holds different sway in different quarters, there is one fundamental trait shared across all communities – you already have to be investing heavily within the UJC system, financially or otherwise to attend Cabinet.

Right there is the major challenge and limitation of Cabinet. While we say it is the Cabinet of the ‘united Jewish communities”, we are convening leaders who are within the system, not those exceptional leaders in our communities who are not “in the system.” For example, I know several individuals in Atlanta who give a multiple of the minimum Cabinet commitment to various Jewish organizations locally and nationally, but have not yet understood the value (or personally appreciated the value) of federated giving, so they are not eligible for Cabinet.  What a lost opportunity (for our communities and our campaigns) – to exclude these impactful young Jewish philanthropists from Cabinet because they are not yet “in the system.” And what about those young leaders involved in innovative change in our various religious communities. What about our best young teachers? Our most influential young writers/artists/bloggers? Why not welcome them as well?

If we want a Cabinet to represent a collection of individuals that truly represent the diversity of young Jewish America and infuse UJC with the ability to engage and harness next generation leadership, we need to invite different people to be part of cabinet. People who challenge one another from inside and outside the existing institutions of Jewish life. We need to reimagine cabinet participation.

Location. The biggest complaint I often hear about the Cabinet conference location is  ”beautiful resort, but really, really hot.” It is hard to empathize with those types of complaints, but having experienced Jewish retreats at beautiful resorts I can appreciate the value of taking individuals to a place where there is a fun and relaxing environment to develop relationships with one another. But Cabinet is more than a retreat, and we should treat is as such.

Why not have Cabinet conferences in communities that need a vibrant injection of young leadership thinking?  Why not set Cabinet conferences up so that, as part of the program, these young leaders fan out across the host community to meet with volunteer and professional leadership facing local challenges and opportunities.  Cabinet members can then share ideas and engage in groupthink about creative solutions for local problems, helping impact the host community as well as themselves.  What community wouldn’t want to help host 400 Jewish leaders who bring with them fresh eyes, fresh thinking and fresh energy? The social element of Cabinet could still be maintained, but we could make Cabinet as much of a concentrated service experience as it is a social and educational one.  Where we host Cabinet says as much about it as the individuals who participate.  If we are reimagining the participants, lets reimagine where they meet.

Vision.  Lastly, we need to reimagine what we expect to receive from Cabinet, We don’t need only engaged individual coming back to our communities with increased pledges to our annual campaigns, but we need innovative visions for the future of the Jewish people. We need them to walk out of their meetings with collective ways not just to transform Federation campaigns, but also to transform community institutions. We get some of that today, but we need a lot more.  Where are the concluding statements and commitments that are made at so many other assemblies of great leaders? Where are the action plans for national initiatives? We need those too – and not just UJC action plans and initiatives but community plans and initiatives.

In this week’s hafotrah, we week read selections from Jeremiah, and in particular Jeremiah’s transmission of God’s lament that “… My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me, the spring of living waters, to dig for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that do not hold water.”

With Cabinet, UJC and young Jewish leadership have powerfully responded to part of God’s lament as conveyed by Jeremiah – by caring enough to gather as a group and to recognize the importance of servicing and strengthening the Jewish people it is clear this significant group of you Jewish leaders (and the organization that hosts them) have not forsaken God or His people.

But we still have some work to do on the second part of the lament. While he have been provided the spring of living waters – in this case dynamic young Jewish leaders, by continuing to engage a Cabinet with a process in need of reimagination, we may be digging for ourselves broken cisterns that do not hold the water.

Lets us built a better Cabinet, a better cistern, to hold a lifeblood of the Jewish people – our current and future young leadership. And then next year, when my friends write to ask, “why am I not here,” the “here” will truly be a center of Jewish future. And I will hope to be there.

You can read more from Seth on his blog, Boundless Drama of Creation. Of particular interest to many of you will be his most recent post, The Search and the Searchers, on the process underway for a new UJC-CEO.

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Almost a year ago, I met with representatives from one of Israel’s leading television and media networks, who had the backing of a prominent philanthropist to implement a social media strategy for Israel’s 60th birthday. Someone had recommended that they meet me, and I prepared a comprehensive presentation about what I called “Israel 2.0,” where we would create and implement a strategy that would celebrating Israel’s accomplishments with a diverse, wide-reaching web presence.

Notice I call it a “web presence”; that is because the web is no longer about just creating a website. It is about using the web and all its potential to promote your business, organization, or ideas with the greatest results possible. It is no longer sufficient to depend on your website alone, particularly since

“a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices” (from ReadWriteWeb).

Anyway, there was one guy in the room listening to my presentation who actually knew some of the terms I was using, like RSS feeds and the like, and I guess this made him feel like a social media expert. So when I finished my presentation, he said “Why do I need all that? I’ll just create a facebook group.”

I made a facebook group; so why am I all alone here?

What? Is he kidding me? I tried to explain until I was blue in the face that creating a facebook group is not a social media strategy, but it’s really difficult to explain concepts to people who have no knowledge of the field you are talking about, so they all believed the facebook-group guy, and that was that.

Needless to say, no all-encompassing web presence was created in honor of Israel’s birthday, and I don’t know what happened to that philanthropist’s offer.

a real social media strategy starts with goals, not tools

To create a serious web strategy, you should not start with the tools. “I’m going to create a blog,” or “I’ll join twitter” is not a strategy, since these may not be the right tools to use to achieve your goals.

I would like to build a house. These look like good tools to use.

Here’s an outline of the general steps needed to create a successful web presence:

1. Identify your goals: what do we want to achieve? Who are we trying to target? Part of this stage is benchmarking: analyzing current statistics; identifying what you hope will be different as a result of your social media efforts; defining parameters that you want to change most and least.
2. Next, work out the strategy: how are we going to achieve these goals? Where do we need to be to reach our target audience, i.e. based on their demographics, where are they hanging out on the web? What type of content will they like? What manpower considerations do we need to be aware of (i.e. the need to hire a Community Manager, etc.)? Do we have legal considerations?
3. Once all of that has been prepared, then and only then can you choose tools and technologies. A facebook group may not be the best strategy for your goals, or it may be appropriate, but maybe it won’t work on its own. Tools and technologies are just the medium, not the message (sorry McLuhan). For example, in the world of print marketing, you know a rollup is exactly what you need to get your message across at the upcoming trade show, but you’d look mighty strange schlepping it to pitch a new client at their office.
4. Implementation. Now you get to have fun with your shiny tools, because they’re the right ones.

Forrester has laid out a similar approach to creating an effective social media strategy by putting technology last, which they coined as POST: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. (Here’s a link to the original blog post, but it looks like Forrester is trying to wipe out any memory of Charlene Li since she left, so you can only access the cached version on Google.)

Like most things in life and business, you need to know what you want to achieve before you decide how you are going to achieve them. And that is why a facebook group is most definitely not a strategy.

Lonely girl image from willgame on flickr

Miriam is CEO of illuminea marketing & media, a Jerusalem-based firm offering social media strategy and implementation services to businesses and organization seeking to create an effective presence on the web. Learn more about social media, blogs and other stuff at illumineaBlog.

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Holier than thou?

Donations from evangelicals are critical to welfare funding, but rabbis are divided on whether it is kosher to accept money from messianic Christians.

Jewish American songs for Shabbat, the High Holy Days and Jerusalem play in the background as one waits for the phone to be picked up at the Jerusalem headquarters of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ). The warm and soft voice is that of organization founder Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein.

“We worked to change what we called the four As: awareness, acknowledgment, appreciation and attitude. Today, the vast majority of evangelical Americans know and appreciate what we do and are willing to take part in it.”

But American liberal Jews were not the only ones who have had reservations about Eckstein and his fellow evangelicals. In Israel, evangelical donations have met opposition from both sides of the spectrum, although apparently such opposition has not always been expressed by a refusal of such funds.

“DURING THE days of Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency, the money was accepted, but not publicly,” says Eckstein.

The IFCJ is a member of the Jewish Agency board. However, recently its board member status was questioned by other members, who argue that the IFCJ hasn’t donated enough to hold a seat on the executive board.

“We will never stop funding and supporting the Jewish Agency,” says Eckstein. “Until now, we have given our annual share - up to $8m. We might raise the sum to $15m. if the Jewish Agency approves the new program we submitted and for which we await its decision, but the basic donation of $8m. is assured in any case.”

Trailblazing through history

If you ask Yehezkel Dror, he’ll tell you that the future of the Jewish people is an uncertain one. The Jews are treading a path through history filled with dangers and challenges, and the key to getting through it all safely, he says, is to sit down and do some serious thinking.

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