The No. 1 Charity

The 450 guests of the glittery Americana Hotel in suburban Miami sat down for a lunch of roast beef, string beans sautee with mushrooms, fondant of potatoes, salad, petits-fours and coffee. Neither butter nor cream was on the table; everything is always strictly kosher at the serious, elaborate dinners that open the annual fund-raising campaigns of the nation's most successful charity, the United Jewish Appeal.

Mostly for Israel. In its 22-year lifetime, U.J.A. has raised more than $1.3 billion--or nearly $250 for every Jewish man, woman and child in the U.S.--in support of Jewry uprooted by World War II. This year the fund expects to raise $72,740,000, nearly a $10 million increase over last year's total. Most of the money will end up in Israel, which has absorbed nearly $700 million in U.J.A. grants since 1948. Specific relief targets: 130,000 immigrants on Israel's impoverished farm settlements, 30,000 aged and handicapped Israelis in need of welfare services, 40,000 recent Israeli immigrants still living in shanty towns. In addition, U.J.A. will help pay the transportation costs of an expected 30,000 new Jewish immigrants to Israel, 5,000 to the U.S.

U.J.A. employs no outside professional fund raisers. Instead, the small, fulltime staff relies on Jewish civic and business leaders with a proud sense of Judaism's traditional willingness to take care of its own. U.J.A.'s fund raisers sell hard and sell soft, specialize in massive telephone assaults on their business friends and fund-raising lunches at which big donors exert moral pressure on the reluctant by publicly announcing their pledges. The drive is conducted in 3,500 communities, with New York City's 2,500,000 Jews generally the highest contributing, followed by Chicago (400,000), Los Angeles (400,000), Philadelphia (300,000). At last week's Miami lunch, guests promised to put up more than $14 million in contributions.

Something for Baltimore. Archetype of U.J.A.'s philanthropists is U.J.A.'s new fund-drive chairman, Baltimore Builder Joseph Meyerhoff, 61. Born in Russia, Meyerhoff went to the University of Maryland Law School, set up shop as a house builder in 1920. During the Depression, he eked out a living as a small-scale real estate operator. Now he runs the Joseph Meyerhoff Corp., a firm that specializes in "community development" projects, averages nearly 600 housing units a year, has helped build Baltimore's four largest shopping centers.

Meyerhoff spends nearly as much time on civic causes as he does on construction: he is president of the city's Associated Jewish Charities (which last year raised $3,100,000 for worthy causes in both Baltimore and Israel), presides over the State Planning Commission. Although he builds no houses in Israel, Meyerhoff is also president of the Palestine Economic Corp., which has raised $11 million for private investment in Israeli industry since 1948. "In my family," he says, "we took for granted that being a Jew and being interested in what was first Palestine and is now Israel were one and the same thing."

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