The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles expects to join half a dozen Jewish federations across the United States this week in an emergency allocation of nearly $250,000 for endangered members of the Falash Mura community in Ethiopia.
\”I don\’t get it,\” one of them told me. \”Here this popular governor is going to Israel at a time when Israel really needs all the friends it can get, and people are turning it into an issue. I\’ve had it with the Jews.\”
Since the program began, it has brought some 60,000 Diaspora youth between the ages of 18 and 26 to Israel for free 10-day guided trips of the country. For many, it is their first trip to Israel. Only youth who never before have been on a peer tour of the country are eligible to participate.
While most participants at the North American Jewish federation system\’s annual conference were happy just to be in Israel this week, the network\’s decision makers were grappling with another matter — funding for overseas partners.
\”He has proved his great potential. He has the attributes of a champion,\” an ecstatic Gebhardt said Sunday of Friedman. \”He has great technique and a strong character, but he needs some moral support to make him even better,\” he said.
President George W. Bush is certainly putting his money where his mouth is. Last week, the State Department announced it will invest $25 million to promote democracy throughout the Arab world. The goals of the program, which will train political advocates, journalists and others, are economic reform and private sector development, education, promotion of civil society and respect for the rule of law.
Pro-Israel faculty at UCLA have launched a petition drive opposing a campaign to get the University of California system to divest itself of investments in corporations doing business in the Jewish state.
Imagine a cellphone ringing and ringing. Put it in a backpack. Put the backpack next to the wreckage of a bus mangled by a bomb. A rescue worker reaches into the backpack to turn the cellphone off because he cannot bear to hear the voice on the other end of the line.
With that image, from an account given in Israeli papers, I asked my congregants on the first day of Passover to help our sisters and brothers in Israel. We cannot win Israel\’s battles nor restore to life those who have died. But we can buy wheelchairs for the injured. We can pay for physical and emotional therapy for those whose lives are scarred by terror. We can provide social services for the shattered lives of the 400 children orphaned by the recent attacks.
Will the religious right dominate the Washington agenda as a Republican president, backed by a mostly GOP Congress, takes the reins of government?
When a 30-something British financial investment manager took a few years off to study Jewish texts in Israel, he was struck by the differences between the financial and Jewish communal worlds.
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