New Jewish Fund for Justice Extends Good Will : Charity Announces Its First Grants to Secular Agencies Fighting Poverty

A new national charity that for the first time extends Jewish institutional philanthropy beyond the Jewish community to secular agencies fighting poverty and social injustice made its initial round of grants this week.

The Jewish Fund for Justice--begun partly with seed money from a Christian church--hopes to raise $1 million this year and $6 million annually by 1990, acting chairman Si Kahn said.

The fund made initial grants totaling $37,000 to 13 poverty groups this week.

Recipients include the Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition, which will get $3,000 for its ongoing operations if it can match that sum with gifts from Los Angeles Jews, and the Navajo Nation in Flagstaff, Ariz., which got $10,000 to develop Israeli drip-irrigation techniques. Other grants support advocacy for children and a loan fund to help a poor Philadelphia neighborhood.

First-Time Presence

Overshadowing the small volume of the initial grants is the first-time presence of a Jewish organization in the national coalition of religious funds that underwrite organizing and support of poor people.

Until now only the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and nine mainline Protestant denominations shared in Ecumenical Review Board, a grant-making network which operates under the aegis of the National Council of Churches.

These 10 Christian organizations give away nearly $20 million annually to secular organizations working to alleviate poverty and social injustice in the United States, according to David Crean, an officer at the national Episcopal Church Center hunger programs in New York.

“This fund creates a Jewish institutional presence in a universe where there is very little Jewish presence, in interfaith coalitions and among that community that supports grass-roots activism,” said David Tobin, who spent 18 months organizing the fund, which is based in Washington.

“The absence of a Jewish institution directed to these concerns has given the impression to some that the Jewish community is not active in that area. It has been active, but only through individual efforts,” Tobin said.

“We are not starting out with a sugar daddy, with an endowment,” Executive Director Lois Roisman said, “but with a group of people who commonly realized that there is this gap in Jewish philanthropy. Our strategy is to spend a year or so in demonstration projects.”

Attracts Wide Support

The Jewish Fund for Justice has attracted the support of a wide array of prominent Jews long active in social reform. Its directors and advisers include Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles; Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Howard Berman (D-Los Angeles); Stuart Eizenstat, President Carter’s domestic policy chief; Letty Cottin Pogrebin, editor of Ms. magazine; Pablo Eisenberg of the Center for Community Change, and Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the Union of America Hebrew Congregations’ Social Action Center in the District of Columbia.

Initial funding for the Jewish Fund came from the Veatch Program at North Shore Unitarian Universalist Church on Long Island, the New World Foundation in New York City, the Levinson Foundation in Brookline, Mass., and two major anonymous donors.

Kahn, the acting chairman, and others developed the idea for the fund after noticing that Christian philanthropic institutions supported the poor people’s groups he works with, but that the only Jewish support came from individual gifts.

“In this society each of our fates is tied to that of others, and to the extent that the Jewish Fund for Justice can support efforts to diminish the hazards to life and strengthen the good parts of life, we all benefit,” said Kahn, a folk singer and former union organizer in Appalachia who is executive director of Grassroots Leadership, a Charlotte, N.C., agency that advises other groups organizing poor people in the South.

He said the Jewish Fund for Justice believes in the observation of Maimonides, the 12th-Century Jewish philosopher, who said, “Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”

Self-Reliance

“Jews are conditioned, historically, to know, and rightfully so, that we have to be self-reliant and take care of ourselves,” Roisman said. “Historically we have lived in countries at the good will of the majority community and when things soured we migrated.

“We came to America as immigrants and got our act together, and now we are the most successful ethnic group in America and it is important that our vision keep up with that.”

The Jewish tradition of charitable giving is so strong that last year the 200 local Jewish Federation Councils in the United States raised $600 million from the nation’s 6 million Jews to support Jewish social service agencies and Israel.

In contrast, the 2,200 local United Ways raised $2.1 billion last year after soliciting about 40 million workers.