Good Friday morning!

The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (JFR) has sent $515,000 to 156 elderly and needy Righteous Gentiles, non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, living in 14 countries around the world, the organization announced this week.

“These men and women had both the courage to care and the courage to act, and the lives they saved in the moment have grown to include tens of thousands of descendants from those they originally saved,” JFR Executive Vice President Stanlee Stahl told eJP.

The disbursement is one of the largest made by the organization in its 35-year history: Nearly $294,000 was distributed to rescuers in Poland, approximately $60,000 to those in Ukraine and just over $56,000 to rescuers in Lithuania.

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem appointed Denis Weil, currently dean at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, as its new director, effective March 1.

PEOPLE, NOT PROGRAMS

Heed the call: ‘Base’ educational philosophy

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“Seven years ago, together with our spouses, we brought to life a shared dream. A dream of creating a new type of pluralistic communal rabbinate not dependent on denomination or institution, a platform for the next generation of young rabbis to serve our peers in the most authentic way we know – through welcoming them into our homes and lives. With our neighborhoods as our pulpit and our families as the offering, we built relationships with thousands of young Jews and their partners and friends,” write Faith Leener and Rabbi Avram Mlotek, respectively the executive director and spiritual director, of the Base movement, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Opening our tents: “If this model sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Chabad has been using radical hospitality as a vehicle for transformation in Jewish communities for years. We felt it was time that rabbis and Jewish leaders outside of the ultra-Orthodox community heed the ancient call of Abraham and Sarah and open our tents. Today, we are proud to have 10 diverse couples leading this movement from a wide spectrum of Jewish backgrounds in New York, Chicago, Boston and Miami.”

Shmita year: “As we enter our seventh year, our shmita year, we have an opportunity to take stock and offer a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, of the work we do, and why. It’s in that vein that we offer our educational philosophy to you, our colleagues in the field… At Base, we strive to model authentic Jewish living in real time. Our rabbis and partners teach Torah not only in the form of scheduled classes and events but in how we greet guests into our home, how we imbibe and reflect back the news, how we engage with (or disengage from) social media, how we decorate our homes and how we react if and when our children ‘interrupt’ our lesson plan. We believe in the need of a Torah that speaks to the vulnerabilities and struggles of our time, in real time, in real life.”

Read the full piece here.

SYSTEMIC CHANGE

We cannot heal what we cannot see

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“In recent weeks, the American Jewish community, particularly the Reform Jewish community, has been rocked again, this time by the release of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s (HUC-JIR) report on decades of sexual misconduct, discrimination and abuse at the seminary,” writes Nicole Nevarez, executive director of Ta’amod, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Teshuvah opportunity: “While a shadow is cast by the actions revealed in the report, the HUC-JIR investigation and the report itself are like a candle revealing what has been long hidden or obscured by an unwillingness to see or to acknowledge. Only through the revealing of truths, the willingness to shed light on what has been hidden and the courage to face the damage do we have an opportunity to heal… Yet, we cannot heal what we cannot see. When, for example, the news of Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior broke four years ago, reckonings broke open in other arenas, including the Jewish academic and professional worlds. With every new report, we have an opportunity to do teshuvah, and implement steps to make healing change. Once illumination occurs and our eyes are open, we have an obligation to engage in the hard work of addressing and taking action towards real systemic change.”

Resources needed: “That change requires a breakdown of old systems where power and money are synonymous. In order to actionably move forward so that we eradicate harassment, abuse, discrimination and inequity; in order to co-create a Jewish communal world where there is no need to illuminate systemic harm because it is no longer a reality – we must allocate resources that elevate the capacity for the work. We must shift the power into the hands of the organizations and professionals that are committed to doing the hard work internally and whose missions themselves are to help others build this vision of a whole and equitable Jewish world.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Pay Equity in NYC: The New York City Council released a report and analysis identifying the ways in which inequity inhabits the city’s pay structure, which the council called “a necessary step toward ensuring that all our City’s employees are valued for their extraordinary contributions.” This sector includes sanitation workers, social service workers, firefighters and custodians, whose compensation for their work is “not always equitable.” The report is an outgrowth of 2018’s Local Law 18, which required the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics to report pay data from city agencies to the council; the council then conducted its own statistical analysis to determine whether any disparities exist across gender, race, age and other categories protected by the City’s Human Rights Law.  [NewYorkCityCouncil]

Looking Back: In his year-end letter, LionTree Chairman and CEO Aryeh B. Bourkoff shares his reflections on the past 12 months. “For many of us, this has been a year of learning, questioning, and digging deep, and I keep coming back to a central metaphor. In the laws of Kashrut, fish have two distinct qualities — fins and scales — and according to the commentators, the fins represent motion and ambition, while the scales represent integrity. Each is valuable in its own right, but to be kosher, a fish must have both, for it is the combination — ambition tempered by integrity, motion guided by morals — that allows us to unlock potential and the greater good. Although there are many fish with fins but no scales, there are none with scales but no fins. Many ambitious people without integrity — sharks in the sea — but none with integrity who are not in movement toward some greater goal.” [LionTree]

Pic of the Day

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Darin McKeever, president and CEO of the William Davidson Foundation, was photographed wearing a festive jacket at the organization’s annual holiday party on Thursday evening. During the party, which was held at the foundation’s new satellite office in downtown Detroit at the Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center, the foundation’s leadership team, lead by Karen Davidson and Ethan Davidson, hung new mezuzot on the doorposts of the office.