Dollars for Israel

It was Israel Night at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House in the third week of the Middle Eastern crisis. Three thousand people, predominantly American Jews, had paid for their admission in advance to the tune of $475,000 worth of Israeli bonds to hear Baritone Robert Merrill, Concert Pianist Eugene List, Singer-Pianist Hazel Scott and Cantor David Kusevitsky. Israel Night, its sponsor, the New York Metropolitan Council of B'nai Brith, had announced, was part of a six-week bond-selling drive, which will be climaxed on Dec. 6 by the Sixth Annual Hanukkah Festival in Madison Square Garden. The fund-raisers' target: an astonishing $8,000,000 for Israel.

Two Thousand Years. This year, by philanthropic devices both extravagant and subtle, U.S. Jews will raise and send something close to $125 million in voluntary charitable contributions to Israel. In the eight years of Israel's independence, American Jewish organizations have already sent more than $700 million to Israel--an outpouring that is the No. 1 phenomenon of U.S. philanthropy.

In 3,500 U.S. communities Jewish leaders work through community-chest-type funds to supply such Israeli needs as the feeding, clothing and resettlement of immigrants (with some 10% of funds going to such U.S. work as fighting anti-Semitism). The Israeli Jewish Agency, which gets 85% to 90% of the contributions from the U.S. through the big United Jewish Appeal, estimates that more than 4,000 immigrants enter Israel each month, that the country needs about $1,000 to keep one new immigrant for one year, or $15,000 to resettle a family of five over a three-year period.

"Jews traditionally have taken care of their own," says U.J.A. Publicist Rayfield Levy. In 1953, for example, the American Red Cross raised about $42 million from some 41 million members while U.J.A. raised more than $65 million from 2,000,000 Jews and some 500,000 non-Jews. When a Catholic dignitary asked U.J.A. President Edward Warburg one day how the Jews were able to raise so much, Warburg replied: "First you start with 2,000 years of persecution."

"Direct Outgrowth." Beyond the U.J.A., such bodies as Hadassah (women's Zionist organization), Histadruth (U.S. branch of Israel's labor organization) and the Zionist Organization of America raise about $15 million a year for specialized Israeli projects, e.g., schools, hospitals, youth groups. And beyond all charitable activity, the Bonds for Israel drive (the income from its 4% bonds is subject to taxation) has raised since 1951 the staggering sum of $275 million. The total breakdown: $800,000 worth of bonds sold every week. These bonds, say Bonds for Israel officials, are popular with gentiles as well as with Jews because of Israel's promising growth potential.

American Jewish leaders have accepted a charitable assignment which now supplies the equivalent of 35% of the annual budget of Israel--in invaluable hard-currency U.S. dollars--and are thus playing a part in the Middle Eastern crisis in which Israel is one of the elemental parts. This, says the nonpolitical U.J.A., is because Israel is where most of the Jews in need now are.

"When Jews were allowed to settle on Manhattan Island in the old colonial days," U.J.A.'s Publicist Levy declares, "they had to sign a contract with the Dutch West India Co. that they would take care of their own poor and bury their own dead. Jewish fund-raising is a direct outgrowth of that."

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