July 9, 2008

By Michele Chabin

Camp Koby kids last year. Eighty who attended
won't be back this summer because of budget cuts
at the camp's foundation. Courtesy of Camp Koby 

Jerusalem — When Camp Koby, a summer camp for young terror victims and their families, kicks off the first of its three sessions this week, 80 children wounded in terror attacks won’t be among the campers.

That’s because the Koby Mandell Foundation, the organization that runs the camp, has been forced to cut back its programming due to the shrinking dollar, whose value against the shekel has fallen about 30 percent in recent years.

“It’s not that we’re raising less money than we did last year; we’re not,” said Reuven Angstreich, the foundation’s executive director. “It’s just that the dollar is worth so much less and it’s having a tremendous impact.”

All over Israel, organizations that subsist largely on dollars are feeling the pinch. Some have reportedly closed while others have had to scale back their activities and/or lay off personnel.

The foundation was launched by Sherri and Seth Mandel, the parents of Koby Mandel, an American-born boy murdered in 2001 in a cave near his home in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa. Angstreich said it has had to slash its budget by 30 percent. Roughly 90 percent of its budget comes from American and Canadian donations, and it receives no government funding.

“We’ve had to limit this year’s summer camp only to bereaved children and haven’t been able to invite back about 80 kids wounded in terror attacks” who attended the camp last year, Angstreich said. “We’ve also had to shorten the camp sessions by two days, from 10 days to eight. We had to shorten our Pesach camp from three days to one. To save money we moved our office from Jerusalem to a small apartment in Efrat,” on the less expensive West Bank.

So far, the foundation, which also offers support groups and retreats for terror victims and their families, has cut about 20 percent of its staff due to the dollar’s plunge.

The hardest part, Angstreich said, has been notifying the wounded childrens’ families that their kids — who have emotional and physical scars — won’t be able to attend the camp this summer.

“The families call and just start crying. The camp is so meaningful to them but we just don’t have the funds,” he said, his voice growing apologetic.

Eliezer Jaffe, co-chairman of the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, estimated that only about 10 percent of the income in the sprawling nonprofit sector actually comes from charitable donations (the majority is derived from government service contracts). But he added that for many organizations “it’s a real crisis.”

“Some nonprofits are more dependent on donor money than others,” Jaffe said.

“Organizations have closed because they can’t handle salaries and taxes and rent and insurance, let alone the services they provide,” items that must be paid in shekels.

According to Jaffe, organizations that deal with poverty, health care and education have been particularly hard hit by the dollar’s decline because American Jewish donors often favor Israeli causes that help develop the country or support the weakest segments of society.

The weakened dollar isn’t the only problem, Jaffe stressed. Even before the dollar’s nosedive “the percentage of money coming to Israel from the Jewish federation system was going down, to a point where much of the campaign goes to local programs in the American Jewish community.”

Taken together, the double cutbacks constitute a major challenge (some would say a disaster) for the federation’s two main Israel-based recipients — the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) and the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) — both of whom are reporting severe shortfalls. And because JAFI and the JDC must support not only their own programs but hundreds of others with fewer shekels for their dollar, the implications could be dire.

In addition to cutting back on programming, the JDC announced that it plans to lay off 60 employees worldwide in the coming months.

Jewish Agency spokesman Michael Jankelowitz says the dollar’s demise has translated into “about a $30 million shortfall” for 2008, out of a budget totaling $320 million.

“We’ve had to make big internal cuts. The aliyah department cut back on programs, the education department cut back on programs. It could mean not doing a big seminar in the FSU or cutting back on a conference planned in the U.S. There’s a hiring freeze, people are being encouraged to retire, but there haven’t been any firings,” Jankelowitz says.

The spokesman insists that JAFI does not plan to decrease its funding to external programs — not in 2008, anyway.

“What was committed to in 2008 is being honored. For example, the Jewish Agency gives more than $5 million to Taglit (Birthright Israel), and that isn’t being cut back.”

As for next year, Jankelowitz said, “the 2009 budget will be discussed at the Board of Governors meeting in November and no one can predict what will happen.”

While larger dollar-dependent organizations are feeling the heat, the smaller ones say they’re already getting burned.

“We’re really suffering,” said Arnold Roth, who, along with his wife, Frimet, established the Malki Fund to honor the memory of their 15-year-old daughter Malka, who was murdered in the Sbarro terrorist attack in 2001. “The dollar’s slide has had a pretty substantial impact on our operations.”

The organization provides medical equipment and therapies that enable severely sick and disabled children to remain at home rather than be institutionalized in a hospital or care facility.

“We’re raising the same amount of money as we did previously, but we have less to spend here in Israel. And it’s not just the dollar. The cost of therapies and certain medical equipment have gone up due to the cost of gasoline and shipping costs in general,” Roth said, noting that a gallon of gas here costs almost $7.50. “We purchase large quantities of bulky goods like wheelchairs, walkers and standers and the cost of freight has skyrocketed.”

About 40 percent of the Malki Fund’s budget comes from the U.S., “but fortunately Friends of Keren Malki in the United Kingdom was just formed and is showing tremendous signs of life. We’re increasing our fundraising in other places. We serve just over 2,000 families and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of need. We’re building, not going back,” Roth insists.

Kalman and Malka Samuels, founders of Shalva, an organization that runs a state-of-the-art facility for disabled children, is equally determined.

Though Shalva, which provides therapies, activities and respite care receives only 20 percent of its budget from the government, and 80 percent of the remainder comes from North American, Kalman Samuels refuses to go into panic mode.

“We have not cut back staff. We have 115 staff members and 23 National Service volunteers. We serve hundreds of families and yet there are hundreds more on the waiting list and we’re building a larger facility because it’s needed. We’re a lifeline and we’re forging ahead.”

Three months ago Shalva broke ground on a 160,000-square-foot facility that, by 2011, will house the Shalva National Children’s Center on land provide by the Jerusalem municipality.

When Samuels closed the deal, the dollar was trading at 4.5, meaning the center would cost $28 million. At today’s dollar rate (3.25 as of Monday), the same complex will cost about $35 million.

“Fortunately, we worked on the American project management method and we’ll only build what we can, stage by stage. We’re not risking our donors’ dollars.”

Speaking by phone from New York where he was meeting with Shalva’s supporters, Samuels, the parent of a blind-deaf son, displays some of his trademark optimism.

“Yes, the dollar is down 28 percent, so I’ll spend another 28 percent of my time in America. I’ll pray 28 percent harder. We have hundreds of children waiting to get in,” said Samuels, “and I’ll do whatever it takes to help them.”