Shabbat Shalom
I have the title of President/CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. I want to admit something. I don’t know everything happening in our community where Federation has a hand in it. This week, I “got schooled” about some of our communal impact. Tuesday night, the Federation distributed checks to college students to assist […]
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I know I haven’t written in several weeks. My lack of authoring this weekly piece is not a reflection on the quantity and quality of work being done by our Federation. During the last few weeks, I was in Israel as part of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Assembly and Board meeting. The Jewish Agency […]
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We focus so much of our work on the planning, fundraising and financial oversight role of the Federation. In fact, at yesterday’s Board meeting, we approved over $9 Million in allocations from our Annual Campaign and Foundation. That happened because of the planning, fundraising and financial oversight we do so well. Sometimes, we have to […]
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What do you think about spying on others? This week’s parshah contains the famous story of Moses sending the twelve spies into the land of Canaan. Ten of them return to falsely describe how terrible the land is in order to scare the people from wanting to travel there. Two, Caleb and Joshua, appropriately and […]
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Yesterday, the Federation presented the Ira and Nanette Gordon Award to Emily Richman, the Federation’s Assistant Campaign Director. The Gordon Award is presented to a professional from the Federation or one of our ten beneficiary agencies who is in the early years of his/her career. Instead of writing to you this week, I want to […]
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A snapshot on your Federation: The 2015 Annual Campaign now sits at $12.3 Million towards our $13.7 Million goal. We have secured $4.9 Million in EITC funds for our Jewish Day Schools and Jewish preschools, a $600,000 increase over last year. Our Foundation has added over $23.5 Million in new and additional funds, already exceeding our goal […]
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This week’s Parsah, Bamidbar, has a description of the twelve tribes and how their camps were structured. While each tribe had its own location where it’s members lived, they all shared in something important, being members of the Jewish people. Saturday night begins the holiday of Shavuot, one of the three pilgrimage holidays in the Jewish calendar. […]
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The Post Gazette printed an insert magazine on Thursday titled, “In the Lead”. While nearly all of it is dedicated to the private and public businesses of our region, one page talked about nonprofits. On that page, there is a list of “Top Foundations”. This list is not ordered by asset size, but by the […]
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Leadership is all about….leading. I’m really proud of a meeting that took place this week in our offices on McKee Place. Many Federations across the country use the same database and website platform. The product we are using is relatively new to all of us. It has incredible capabilities. Our marketing and Information Technology (IT) […]
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It’s been a marathon week of nonstop activity. At the beginning of it, over 30 Pittsburghers who graduated from the Wexner Heritage Program as well as recipients of the Wexner Fellowship descended on Columbus, OH to celebrate the Wexner Foundation’s 30th Anniversary. This wasn’t just a party of 1,200 people from around North America and Israel, it […]
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I remember in the late 1970’s, my parents saved up enough money to take their first trip to Israel. When they returned, they gave me and my siblings gifts. I remember I was given a t shirt that said “Israel Is Real”. I know it sounds a little corny today, but it was a big […]
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Passover ends and immediately the activity in the Jewish community starts to move at a frantic pace. The number of events, programs and meetings is beyond belief and is a testament to the kind of engaged and interested community we have. I would only mention one such event from this past week, the Yom Hashoah […]
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A quick story about something that happened to me this week… My daughter is participating in a teen trip to Israel this summer. I called the office of the organization running the trip to let them know that our Federation subsidizes every teen going on a teen trip to Israel (when you have attended a […]
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Wednesday was a great day. It started with a meeting and ended with an event. The morning meeting, a two hour gathering of a great group of committed lay leadership, engaged the group in serious discussion about our community and how to best address one of our communal priority areas in order to get the […]
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I take much of the language in this week’s Shabbat message from a correspondence I received from our national system, the Jewish Federations of North America. I know that for many of us our “Jewish attention” has been focused on our local Jewish community, on the Israeli elections and on growing anti-Semitism across Europe. I […]
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The buzz this past week has been about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech in Congress. Admittedly, there is a divide both within and from outside the Jewish community as to whether the Prime Minister should have given the speech at all. There is debate about the right way to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. One thing […]
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In last week’s New York Times Magazine, “The Ethicist” had a question posed to him. The question raised was, “During a pledge drive for a public-radio station, an on-air personality made an accusation I’d never heard: that regular listeners who never contributed were behaving unethically.” Is it unethical? The Ethicist responded that it was not […]
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Debbie Winn Horvitz, the CEO of the Jewish Association on Aging, spoke at a meeting of the Federation Beneficiary Agency Executives. Debbie mentioned that at a recent session of the Wechsler Leadership Development Institute (Federation’s Young Adult leadership development program), one of the attendees was very taken by an aspect of the work of the […]
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A tremendous Fundfest took place this past week. Despite some tough weather, hundreds came to the Federation offices to get on the phones to reach out and connect with other fellow community members to ask for their support of our 2015 Campaign. Fundfest has propelled our campaign to $6 Million and added many new donors to our […]
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The Centennial Fund for a Jewish Future, our Federation’s initiative to secure permanent endowment dollars to fund Jewish identity building programming, has had exceptional progress since its inception just five years ago. To date, approximately $24 Million in commitments have been secured and with much of those commitments already being paid by generous donors, we […]
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