FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

How a little-discussed ‘clearinghouse’ for Israel donations stepped in when it saw a ‘glaring’ need for bomb shelters in Druze communities

Normally operating as a go-between for Israeli nonprofits and American donors, PEF Israel Endowment Funds, Inc. proactively launched an effort to provide fortified mobile shelters to areas in need

The usual procedure for grant-making goes like this: Someone identifies a need, finds a potential funder, makes a request; the funder considers the proposal and, if convinced, issues the grant. But that’s not what happened with a recent initiative to provide bomb shelters to Druze communities in northern Israel.

Instead, a comparatively little known grant-maker — PEF Israel Endowment Funds, Inc. — was watching where money was being donated and noticed an omission: the Druze community.

“We’re a clearinghouse, and we see where the money is going,” the organization’s president, Geoffrey Stern, told eJP recently. “We were seeing all the grants coming in, and there were grants going for trauma and for the [displaced] people. We didn’t see many grants coming in for that group.”

Seeing that Druze Israelis in particular, many of whom live in areas of northern Israel that have come under regular attack by Hezbollah and had not been evacuated (in some cases because they’d refused to do so on ideological grounds), lacked public bomb shelters, PEF  — specifically board members Rafi Musher and Ariella Raviv — sought to find an organization that could spearhead such a project to provide shelters. (This was before Hezbollah’s rocket attack on the Druze town of Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights, in which 12 children were killed.)

“We felt very strongly that this was an area that wasn’t being addressed,” said Stern, noting the Druze community’s dedication to the State of Israel and its service in the Israel Defense Forces. “We understood that shelters are not only about protecting people. Shelters are about keeping your life moving forward. You can’t open the day cares if there’s’ not a shelter. You can’t have an after-school program if there’s not a shelter there.”

Stern said that the community has been underfunded for some time, but the war in Israel has made it clear that they are in need and have only been getting by until now because the circumstances have allowed it. “Warren Buffet said, ‘You can only tell who’s not wearing a bathing suit when the tide goes out,’” Stern said, slightly cleaning up a quote from the famed investor.

At 102 years old, PEF Israel Endowment Funds — originally originally Palestine Endowment Funds, Inc. — is one of the oldest Zionist charities in the United States, having been founded by Justice Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Robert Szold (third cousin to Henrietta). Today, it functions primarily as a go-between for U.S. donors and Israeli nonprofits of all stripes, typically those that are too small to warrant a dedicated “American friends of.” (In accordance with IRS regulations, PEF considers donors’ requests for grant recipients as “recommendations.”)

But while it administers grants totaling some $160 million in an average year — this ballooned to $289 million in 2023, according to its latest 990 filing — PEF Israel Endowment Funds tends to fly under the radar as it maintains a small number of employees and volunteer leadership and does not have a particular guiding ideology beyond supporting “needy persons” and the sick, as well as educational and religious institutions in Israel.

“[Donors] like us because we don’t charge for our services, and, obviously, the recipient charities like us because we don’t charge for our services,” Stern said. “We’re run by volunteers, such as myself… Our overhead is typically less than 2%, but because last year the grants went up, and we had the same number of employees, [our overhead] went down below 1%.” (The organization’s budget is covered by an annual fee charged to its endowment funds.)

PEF already had some experience funding such bomb shelter initiatives from the beginning of the war, when it worked with organizations installing shelters for Bedouin Israelis, many of whom live in unrecognized villages that both lack fortified infrastructure and are generally not protected by Iron Dome batteries, Stern said.

“We had to find an organization who would be able to work with us,” he said.

PEF had facilitated grants for a Druze organization in the past, Ofakim Le’Atid (Horizons for the Future), though it had never before run a bomb shelter installation program. Until the beginning of this year, Ofakim Le’Atid had been focused on running social and education projects in the Druze community — youth groups, after-school programs, pre-army preparation programs and a tourism initiative. After the Oct. 7 attacks, the group also stepped up its volunteer efforts, its support programs for soldiers and their families, the executive director of the organization, Sleiman Abbas, told eJP.

“In December, Ariella [Raviv] got in touch with me, and we met in Hurfeish with [Stern] in February-March,” Abbas said.

The organization was well situated to oversee the program as many of its members perform their reserve service with the Israel Defense Forces’ Home Front Command, which is responsible for civil defense, he noted. The Rashi Foundation, which also works widely in the Druze community, has also come on board to assist in the effort.

Using some of PEF’s own discretionary funding and private donations, and bringing in Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies and the Jewish Federation of Washington, D.C., they raised some $400,000 for the project, with the goal of raising another $800,000, Stern said last month. 

The bomb shelters that Ofakim Le’Atid has been installing are a simple design known as a migunit — effectively a reinforced concrete box that can be moved on flat-bed trucks and installed with a crane — and despite being a limited solution to the shortage of bomb shelters in northern Israel, they can be far more easily and cheaply than larger, more permanent structures. They can fit up to 15 standing people and are installed based on the military’s assessments of where the greatest need is, such as near bus stops and markets, according to Abbas.

“So far we’ve distributed 19 miguni’ot, and we are waiting for the latest contribution to do another 11,” he said.

The shortage of bomb shelters in northern Israel is a well-documented issue, with the country’s state comptroller repeatedly calling for the government to take action, including in the weeks following the Oct. 7 terror attacks, after Hezbollah had already begun to fire barrages at northern Israel. And yet for budgetary and bureaucratic reasons, the issue has not been meaningfully addressed.

“Hopefully, there won’t be a war, and there won’t be a need [for bomb shelters],” he said. “And ultimately this really shouldn’t be our job, but we are dealing with this because there’s a great need.”

During the meeting in the Druze town of Hurfeish, Stern met with a number of other Druze organizations in a “‘Shark Tank’-type situation,” to see how PEF could assist them as well, Stern said.

Stern stressed that this — actively looking for Israeli nonprofits to solve a particular problem —  was not what PEF normally does. “But it seemed to us that this was too glaring a need [to ignore],” he said, encouraging other grantmakers to also proactively look for problems to solve and not only wait for requests.

Stern noted that since PEF often serves small Israeli nonprofits, they are often less savvy about fundraising and public relations, even if they are “doing God’s work.”

“For us and for our donors, [that meeting] was an access ramp that enables us to be more thoughtful and more generous in terms of supporting the Druze,” he said, adding that, despite the Druze community’s many strengths, “I don’t think they are great fundraisers.”

Abbas, who does have experience raising money for his organization from American donors, agreed. “The American Jewish community really shows a desire to help and empathy for what’s happening here. There’s just not the knowledge [in the Druze community], and there aren’t the relationships. That’s the whole story,” he said.