Good Monday morning!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we take a look at how synagogues are thinking about dues this year, and feature an op-ed ahead of the High Holidays about more compelling apologies. In this newsletter: Lauren Cohen Fisher, Andrea Hoffman, Craig Newmark, Akilah Watkins, Ellen Katz, Kurt and Marilyn Wallach, Chip and Summer Wilson, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, MacKenzie Scott, Ron Fowler, M. Evan Wolkenstein, Dan Alter and Harriet Bograd. We’ll start with an “unusual” response from a college president to antisemitism allegations.

When universities have faced federal investigations or complaints of alleged antisemitism on their campuses, their response has sometimes been to decry hatred, pledge to protect students and promise to examine the allegations — at times commenting on those they have has already addressed. Others have stayed mum, citing an ongoing investigation.

The University of Vermont did something different. Facing an investigation of alleged antisemitism from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, the University of Vermont’s president, Suresh V. Garimella, wrote a strident public letter denying the charges one by one, asserting that the university is prompt in addressing antisemitic incidents and saying that the complaint that prompted the investigation “painted our community in a patently false light.”

“While common wisdom dictates remaining patiently silent as we cooperate diligently with an agency’s investigation, I simply cannot do so,” Garimella wrote. “UVM vigorously denies the false allegation of an insufficient response to complaints of threats and discrimination.”

Garimella’s letter was “very unusual,” Mark Rotenberg, Hillel International’s vice president of university initiatives and legal affairs, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “University presidents do not typically provide detailed public rebuttals or criticize their own students for filing civil rights complaints with the U.S. Department of Education, which is their legal right,” Rotenberg added. “Also unusual was the president’s failure to pledge cooperation with the government’s investigation.”

The organizations that filed the complaint — the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Jewish on Campus — denounced Garimella’s letter, saying in a statement that it “shows neither reflection, nor understanding, nor remorse. Instead, Garimella demonstrates only the dismissive attitude that has left Jewish students vulnerable to harassment and discrimination, blaming the victims who blew the whistle on UVM anti-Semitism rather than pledging to respond to the problems that federal investigators will now examine.”

A coalition of pro-Israel groups, spearheaded by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said on Friday that Garimella’s letter serves to “blame the victims.” The statement also criticized “the inference that aggrieved Jewish students should not have sought recourse through a regular legal process that exists for the very purpose of investigating civil rights complaints, including those pertaining to antisemitism.”

One organization that has declined to address Garimella’s letter directly is UVM Hillel, which pointed eJP to a statement released shortly after Garimella’s letter that did not discuss its contents or include his name. The Hillel statement said its leadership has “been at the forefront of meeting with the university administration to amplify student voices and express concerns about the campus climate on behalf of the UVM Jewish community. We stand unequivocally with our Jewish students, allies, friends, and family and are committed to helping them bring their voices to the table and be heard by the university.”

PAYING DUES

Pandemic’s aftermath and economic crisis have some synagogues rethinking their membership fees

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

As a policy, Manhattan’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah doesn’t sell tickets for services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. To charge for High Holidays, says synagogue President Sabrina Farber, is “just not in our DNA.” But this year, two years of a pandemic plus a recent economic downturn have made sticking to that policy more challenging for CBST. And it’s not alone, writes Jay Deitcher for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Fixed to voluntary: As synagogues begin to consider next year’s budget, Barry Mael, the senior director of synagogue affiliations and operations for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, told eJP that an increasing number of synagogues are considering moving from fixed to voluntary dues. “I’m getting more calls in the last several months about synagogues… evaluating if their dues model was the best dues model for them,” he said. “Sometimes coming out [of] something like a pandemic, where so many things have been upended, it’s a good time to evaluate and say, ‘Are we generating our revenues and supporting the community in the best way?’”

New means of support: Synagogues are also searching for new ways to support themselves. Some synagogues have planted cell towers on their buildings while others sold their buildings and rented space for less money. The synogages that eJP spoke to said that they haven’t had to cut staff, often thanks to federal pandemic loans that were quickly forgiven, but they also haven’t been able to grow programs and initiatives as they would like to.

Read the full story here.

SMART APOLOGIES

The year of better apologies

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“Apologies are sacred and redemptive, and it’s time to relegate bad ones to the dustbin of history,” write Lauren Cohen Fisher, director of Jewish Student Life at Colby College, and Andrea Hoffman, director of experience design and gatherings for the Center for Jewish and Israel Education at Hillel International, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

A month of reflection: “The Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah is preceded by Elul, which started this year on Aug. 26. It’s a month of reflection, where Jews take an accounting of our souls and of our relationships in search of repentance, repair and forgiveness. Yet over the years, the two of us have been offered apology after apology that left us feeling small… and have also given apologies that have left others feeling unseen. We’d like to change that.”

Learning from others: “This year, we’ve been learning from a broad range of thinkers, such as Harriet Lerner, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Rabbi Alan Lew and 12th-century scholar Maimonides in hopes that we can offer more meaningful apologies this Elul.”

SMART apologies: “Inspired by ‘SMART’ goals — a model created by a trio of business consultants in the 1980s to help ground aspirations in reality — we have been piloting SMART apologies within our relationships in hopes of giving and receiving more powerful teshuva (repentance).”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Craig’s Philanthropic List: Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is supporting various charities backing trustworthy journalism, voter protection and other philanthropic causes, including the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Glenn Gamboa writes in an interview with Newmark in The Associated Press. [Newmark says] “I have the disadvantage of being an amateur in philanthropy. But my biggest advantage is that I am an amateur in philanthropy. I’m not constrained by annual budget cycles and so on, although I have to deal with things like adjusting my burn rate because the biggest single area of expenditures is in supporting democracy. I’m trying to lead by example. And all I know is how to lead from the grassroots and the very bottom up. I have no skills for top-down leadership.” [AP]

Pic of the Day

Misha Kovalev

In Dnipro, Ukraine, a homebound Jewish senior enjoys the taste of the High Holiday season — apples and honey — prepared by a worker for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. This traditional holiday fare was included in holiday food aid packages provided to thousands of needy Jewish elderly in Ukraine for Rosh Hashanah during the ongoing conflict.