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From the president, Kenneth R. Heyman
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By the close of the year, be sure to close your gift: your campaign gift or a fund with JCF
It also brings the perfect time to make your pledge to the 2008 UJA Campaign. The work we do together is so important. You have until the end of December 2008 to fulfill your pledge, but it is important that we receive your pledge as soon as possible, so that we can plan for future. |
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Stacey & Gene Davis For Stacey and Gene Davis of Livingston, involvement in the Jewish community is extensive, natural, and deliberate. Their commitment to the Jewish community and to working for Jewish continuity is both the most natural thing to be doing, and at the same time, something that must be passed on to future generations in an intentional way. |
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Metro Transport sinks its teeth into solving problems for MetroWest seniors Metro Transport is a transportation service for MetroWest seniors and people with disabilities. The service is run by the Daughters of Israel nursing facility in affiliation with several other organizations serving the MetroWest community, including United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ. |
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Hanukkah: a celebration of Jewish identity
As we prepare for an early Hanukkah this year, as we get ready to light the menorah and give of presents to our children for eight days, it is good to remember that Hanukkah has a serious message for us. It is a message that is particularly important in today’s world.
Hanukkah is a celebration of the Maccabees’ refusal 2,200 years ago to give up their religion. The temple in Jerusalem had been seized by Antiochus, the Greek king of Syria, and the Jews had been ordered to worship the Greek gods. And the Maccabees had refused, and revolted.
When they lit the menorah with one-day’s worth of oil and witnessed the miracle of the lights burning for eight days, they were rededicating the temple to Judaism.
Hanukkah is a reminder that we have always had enemies who wanted to convert us, who wanted us to stop being Jewish. And in today’s world, Hanukkah should also remind us that the danger of disappearing as Jews is not only a danger that can come from an enemy. It is also something we can do to ourselves.
In last month’s Donor’s Spotlight, Archie Gottesman told us about a Hebrew school teacher “who said that it would be my generation that would finish up what Hitler didn’t – that we would be the ones to assimilate the Jewish People out of existence.”
The intermarriage rate is high and, more important, the involvement of Jewish youth as well as the children of mixed marriages in Jewish education is not all it can be.
The continuity of Jewish identity is something we are actively working for at UJC. That is why we, our philanthropists, and our lay leaders are dedicated to Jewish education through programs like the MetroWest Day School Campaign, which maintains affordable Hebrew school tuition; Holocaust Remembrance Journeys, which take teens to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; and Birthright Israel, to send young adults on their first peer-group trip to Israel for free. That is why we began the Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life.
As we all celebrate with latkes and light, we should remember that being Jewish is a responsibility and a privilege that we have had to fight for – for 3,000 years. We should remember that teaching our children to be Jewish is a responsibility that we cannot afford to take lightly. That is a Hanukkah message we can all rejoice in.
Happy Hanukkah!
Kenneth R. Heyman
President
United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ
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By the close of the year, be sure to close your gift – your campaign gift or a fund with JCF
As the end of the year approaches, we would like to ask you to remember the importance and the joy of giving through United Jewish Communities (UJC) of MetroWest NJ. The end of this month brings a deadline for making your gift: for fulfilling your 2007 UJA campaign pledge and for getting a 2007 tax deduction.
It also brings the perfect time to make your pledge to the 2008 UJA Campaign. The work we do together is so important. You have until the end of December 2008 to fulfill your pledge, but it is important that we receive your pledge as soon as possible, so that we can plan for future.
And if you haven’t yet paid your pledge to the 2007 UJA Campaign, please do so while you have the thought in mind. Remember, you have only until the end of this month to fulfill your, and our, commitment to the Jewish community.
Your gift to UJA will help support important services here in our own community, including Jewish education, care for the elderly, job training, and counseling for families in need. A UJA pledge is an unrestricted gift, available for use for any of our regular commitments to Jews in need anywhere in the world, and for any emergencies that arise over the course of the year. UJA is the way we insure that we are prepared to respond to any problem that confronts the Jewish people, from a single person out of work to a threat to the state of Israel.
To make a pledge for the 2008 UJA Campaign or to fulfill your 2007 Campaign pledge, please visit www.ujcnj.org and follow the link to our campaign web page, or call (973) 929-3000.
Through the Jewish Community Foundation (JCF) of MetroWest NJ, there is only one more month to take advantage of a unique opportunity for using your IRA to establish a legacy of planned giving. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 entitles donors 70.5 years and older to rollover up to $100,000 directly to a qualified charity in 2007 without incurring federal income tax on the withdrawal.
This means that the chance to make a designated gift focused on the community problems that concern you most, or to provide significant unrestricted funds to help meet community needs now and in the future, is more advantageous and less expensive to you than it has been, or will be shortly.
JCF has a variety of options for helping you meet your philanthropic goals:
- Charitable Bequest – establish a donation through your will.
- Charitable Gift Annuity – make a one-time gift ($10,000 or more) that provides you with fixed income for life, beginning at age 65 or later; the remainder of the gift goes to the Jewish community.
- Donor-Advised (“Philanthropic”) Fund – establish a fund with a minimum gift of $10,000, to receive a tax deduction and retain the right to recommend grants over your lifetime and the lifetime of your successor.
- IRA or Pension Plan – designate JCF as the beneficiary of your IRA or qualified pension plan, which will offer you significant tax advantages.
- Life Insurance Gift – make UJC or another organization the owner and beneficiary of a life insurance policy. You will receive a tax deduction for your premiums.
Whichever method you use to make your gift to the Jewish community, whichever choice you make, it is the right choice – because it saves lives, brings safety and dignity and the joy of health, security, and self-respect to the lives of so many. The time is right for you to complete your gift, because the time is right now.
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Donor Spotlight: Stacey & Gene Davis
For Stacey and Gene Davis of Livingston, involvement in the Jewish community is extensive, natural, and deliberate. Their commitment to the Jewish community and to working for Jewish continuity is both the most natural thing to be doing and at the same time, something that must be passed on to future generations in an intentional way.
Gene’s participation with the Jewish community is rooted in his family and his upbringing.
“My family are survivors,” he explained, “and it’s part of our daily life to be involved. My own involvement goes back to when I was in high school, when I was fairly active in USY. And I was a USY advisor when I was in college.”
When the couple married, they moved to Texas, first to Houston and then to Dallas. In Dallas, where there was, according to Gene, “a tight-knit Jewish community,” he served as the head of the lawyer’s division of the Jewish federation, which, he noted, won an award for Division of the Year.
Since moving to New Jersey, Gene’s work schedule has reduced his degree of active involvement. However, Stacey has taken over with exuberance, keeping up a family tradition. Her direct participation began in Dallas.
“When we moved to Dallas, we had a one-year-old child and Stacey was not going to be working,” Gene recalled. “I was concerned that, having moved twice in four years, it would be hard for her to make friends. She had been the president of a Jewish sorority at the University of Maryland, and has latent organizational abilities. So, when I came to Dallas a number of weeks before Stacey and the baby, I called every Jewish organization I could find, Hadassah, ADL, Jewish Federation, local synagogues. I told them my wife is moving up with our child and asked them to invite her to whatever they were doing. When she arrived a few weeks later, there was a pile of mail waiting for her.”
Everything else came naturally. The organizations whose events Stacey attended began to recognize her abilities and offer her opportunities to be involved. And her participation has been growing since. In Dallas, she worked with the Young Women’s Division of the Jewish federation, then called the Younger Set, became its president, and was a recipient of the Federation Young Leadership Award. In New Jersey, Stacey began by working with Women’s Department. She was president of Women’s Department from 2003 to 2005 and has chaired many events, including CHOICES, the Lion of Judah event, Women’s Awareness Day, and Leadership Development. She is now chair of Women’s Department Major Gifts and sits on the boards of UJC, Women’s Department, Solomon Schechter Day School, and JCC MetroWest, as well as the UJA Campaign Cabinet.
When asked why she has responded so vigorously to her opportunities to be involved, Stacey finds it to be inexplicably natural.
“I grew up in a very secular home,” she observed, “and I was fortunate to always have felt a strong connection to my Jewish identity. It’s hard to explain. I didn’t have any formal Jewish education, but my grandparents were from Russia, and there was a bit of a tradition in my family of getting together for the holidays. But there was no real meaning to the holidays. We didn’t go to services, and I never went to Hebrew School.”
Nevertheless, Stacey’s sense of Jewish identity is as strong as Gene’s, and they share a commitment to instilling a sense of Jewish identity in their children, in a deliberate way. They feel that parents and the community have a responsibility to maintain Jewish continuity through Jewish education, and more.
“It is important for children to have a good Jewish education,” Stacey explained, “as important as it is for them to study math, science, social studies, and English. I first realized how important when I went to a retreat where Dennis Prager spoke about the importance of Jewish education to the community and for the benefit of our own families. Jewish education should be part of our kids’ upbringing, and that’s why we sent our children to Solomon Schechter, in Dallas and in New Jersey.”
The emphasis Stacey and Gene place on Jewish education has certainly furthered Jewish continuity in their own family. This past May, their oldest son married another former student from Solomon Schechter Day School. The two had become friends at the day school and began dating when they were in college.
When asked how well they feel the American Jewish community is doing at passing along a sense of Jewish identity to the younger generation, they believe “we’re working hard at it, but there are a lot of challenges.
“What we’ve been doing in the past is not going to work necessarily with the next generation,” Stacey pointed out. “A lot of organizations are realizing that there has to be a different approach in how we try to engage this age group, how we try to get them involved. We have to find out what they need and not try to get them to do what we want. I don’t know what the answers are, but we have to try constantly, and we have to try everything we can.”
Hard as it can sometimes be, Stacey and Gene feel that we have to keep making the effort to insure Jewish continuity, that it is a matter of responsibility.
“One of the most inspiring things for me, something that keeps me going,” Stacey said, “is a statement from Rabbi Tarfon in the Pirkei Avot: ‘You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it’.”
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Metro Transport sinks its teeth into solving problems for MetroWest seniors
Metro Transport is a transportation service for MetroWest seniors and people with disabilities. The service is run by the Daughters of Israel nursing facility in affiliation with several other organizations serving the MetroWest community, including United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ.
The staff of Metro Transport takes a personal interest in the well-being of its clients, sometimes going to remarkable lengths to see to their health and comfort.
Jamaala Houston is a driver for Metro Transport. One day not long ago, on a Friday afternoon, she received a phone call from “Dorothy,” one of the residents of the Lester Senior Housing Community on the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus, in Whippany.
“She said, ‘hello, my name is Dorothy,’ ” recalled Houston. “ ‘Your voice sounds so nice. I’ve heard so much about you. You’ve never met me, but I was wondering if you could help me. I broke my dentures, and I’m too embarrassed to go downstairs and eat.’ ”
To arrange for Metro Transport to pick up Dorothy to take her to her dentist would require going through the main office of the service, which would take a little time. But Houston had another idea for helping her.
“I said, ok Dorothy. What I can do for you is pick up your dentures and take them where you want them to go. I’ll get back to you on Monday and see if that’s possible.
“Well, I got calls from Dorothy several times on Saturday, and then several times on Sunday. I told her finally that it would be Monday morning at eight o’clock.”
When Monday morning arrived, Dorothy was on the phone to Houston at the very time the driver was scheduled to arrive.
“I said, ok Dorothy, you’ve got to get off the phone with me and go downstairs and give your dentures to the driver. She’s downstairs right now, waiting for you, and be sure to tell her where to take the dentures.”
Dorothy got off the phone, went downstairs, gave her dentures to the driver, and then returned to her room to call Houston again to say that she had forgotten to give the driver the address of her dentist.
“I said, ok Dorothy, give me the address. I’ll call the driver and give it to her.”
Houston called the driver, had the dentures delivered, and then “prayed the dentures would be ready by three o’clock, when a driver would be in that area.
“We didn’t have that kind of luck. They called me at around a quarter after three. So, I called my driver, told her I’d send another driver to pick up the dentures and who would then meet her while she was still on her way to Lester Housing, so she could deliver the dentures to Dorothy.”
Which is what happened, and Dorothy got her dentures. And Dorothy made another phone call to Houston, to ask what she could do for Houston to repay her for all that Houston had done.
“I told Dorothy, I’m glad I was able to help you, and if you want to do something, you can donate to the Daughters of Israel. And she said she would.
“And,” Houston added, “to this day, I have not met Dorothy, but I have talked to Dorothy on the telephone.”
The DOI Plafsky Family Campus is a 303-bed state-of-the-art skilled nursing facility in West Orange. In the entire MetroWest community, it is the only such geriatric center that is Jewish and kosher. The facility provides comprehensive health-related services. The staff includes a full-time medical director, geriatricians, clinical nurse practitioners, dieticians, and a full-time rabbi. A physician is on call 24 hours a day.
Other components of DOI include the JVS vocational workshop for DOI residents and members of the Day Center, the Herr Adult Medical Day Center, an active Family Council, HAREL apartment living with assistance, a caregiver support group, a Gift Shop, a Thrift Shop, the Women’s League, and the Two Cents Plain Coffee Shop.
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Dan Smith, a MetroWest teen to make us all proud
Every so often, there are stories about MetroWest teens that show us our children are the true jewels of our community, that they have something to teach us about the heart of Jewish values.
Those who think our children are drifting away from our tradition should listen to the story of Dan Smith of Livingston. His story shows that, with the support of UJC and projects of MetroWest philanthropists, young men and women like Dan Smith can do more than make us proud. They can set an example for us all.
When Smith had his bar mitzvah in 2005, for his bar mitzvah project he participated in the Twin with a Survivor program of UJC’s Holocaust Council. Through the program, he was paired with Fred Heyman, a Holocaust survivor who shared with Smith his experiences as a boy in Nazi Germany. Heyman also emphasized his belief that the Holocaust was possible because those who witnessed what was happening stood by and did nothing to oppose it.
According to Sheri Goldberg, Smith’s mother, “Dan shared his Bar Mitzvah with Fred, who was unable to continue his education or practice his religion in Nazi Germany, and made a pledge to Fred, that he would keep Fred’s story alive and pass it on to future generations. Dan also pledged that he would not be an innocent bystander to injustice.”
Smith has done more than keep his pledge. The year after his bar mitzvah, his eighth grade English class read Night by Elie Wiesel, and Smith suggested that Fred Heyman be brought in to speak to the entire eighth grade class at an assembly.
To mark the first anniversary of his bar mitzvah, Smith organized a Holocaust Remembrance Journey, a day trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., conducted by the Morris Rubell Holocaust Remembrance Journeys Fund, in coordination with UJC. Although the Holocaust Remembrance Journeys are usually organized through individual schools, Smith worked directly with the people at the fund to put the trip together himself.
“At the assembly,” Smith explained, “we handed out pamphlets to sign up for the trip. A lot of people decided to go.”
The Morris Rubell Holocaust Remembrance Journeys Fund conducts reaction meetings each year for the young people who took the journey. At his meeting, Smith was awarded a Leader for Tomorrow Award by the Holocaust Council and the Morris Rubell Fund – for helping to sensitize and educate others about the Holocaust and the need for tolerance.
At the same meeting, another student gave a slideshow about the genocide in Darfur.
“I didn’t know much about Darfur before I saw that slideshow,” Smith recalled, “but it motivated me to do something about it.”
That is precisely what he did. At the meeting, Smith also was told about a Darfur rally in Washington, D.C., which he attended with a few friends. At the rally, he discovered an organization called Help Darfur Now. Smith decided to start a chapter in his middle school.
By that time, it was May of Smith’s last year in middle school. In the remaining month of the school year, the chapter conducted bake sales and sold T-shirts they were supplied by Help Darfur Now. In that one month, they raised $2,000.
In addition, Smith helped to organize a viewing of the film Darfur Diaries at his synagogue. After the film, he and another Rubell Holocaust Journeys participant led the adult congregants in a letter writing campaign, with letters written on paper plates, to signify the hunger in Darfur. Hundreds of paper plate letters were later presented to Carolyn Fefferman, senior advisor to U.S. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
When Smith entered high school, he and his friends brought the chapter with them. They’ve conducted a number of activities in support of Darfur relief, including taking a busload of their members last year to a rally for Darfur in Central Park. In addition, Smith had the opportunity to speak this year at the Global Day for Darfur rally, which was held in front of the United Nations. Part of his speech can be viewed at www.helpdarfurnow.org/video/rally.html.
The highlight of the first year of the high school chapter was an event that took the whole year to plan, a full day of educational sessions at school, for the entire school.
“We had many speakers come and speak during each period of the day in the school auditorium. They talked to students who came with their classes or who got passes out of their classes so they could come to hear that speaker. Fred Heyman spoke. We had Dr. Jerry Ehrlich, who is a representative of Doctors without Borders. He talked about his own trip to Darfur. We had Arielle Wistosky, the founder of Help Darfur Now, and we had Darfurian refugees.”
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