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Editorials are posted and archived on JN Online:
www.detroitjewishnews.com

Stakeholder Responsibility

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elping Israel build precious infrastructure
and helping attract younger supporters to
the cause is the aim of the newly recon-
stituted Jewish National Fund board in
metro Detroit.
It's a worthy aim.
For 102 years, the JNF has worked to make the
countryside compatible for all who live in, support
and visit Israel. It's the caretaker of Eretz Yisrael on
behalf of its owners, the Jewish people. Jewish
Detroit should have an active part in sustaining this
ecological lifeline. We should be adept enough at
fund-raising to merit a shaliach, our own Israeli emis-
sary.
With roots in biblical agricultural law, the
JNF sprouted from Theodor Herzl's Fifth
Zionist Congress in 1901. Over its first
century, the JNF helped acquire and devel-
op the land in what became the State of Israel in
1948. The JNF not only created forests, but also
infrastructure for housing, roads, drinking water,
parks, drainage and recreation.
Today, the JNF works in tandem with the Israel
Lands Authority.
During the 1990s, drought, bureaucracy and one-
million immigrants from the former Soviet Union
and Ethiopia highlighted Israel's chronic water short-
age. Ambitious water initiatives brought dams, reser-
voirs, desalination plants and river cleanup.
A $10 million initiative is bringing security bypass
roads along Israel's northern border with Lebanon so
children and their parents can travel to school and
work unharmed.
JNF's once-vibrant presence in metro Detroit faded
a few years back as fund-raising efforts changed.
Since then, local JNF activity has been sporadic, the
work of dedicated volunteers.

Dry Bones

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Not too many years ago, claims of misman-
agement dogged the JNF national leadership.
The agency became a spectacle in 1998 when
the Knesset debated whether it still had a pur-
pose.
Since then, the JNF has reorganized its
leadership and sought younger supporters
unburdened by old ways. More accountability
has resulted. Today, the diaspora sends $40
million a year to Israel via the JNF — over a
quarter of the JNF's $150 million annual
budget. Land leases provide the bulk of the
revenue.
Time will tell if the new Midwest shaliach,
Kami Robinson of West
Bloomfield, can reawaken Detroit
Jewry's JNF spirit. He's off to a
good start in telling the JNF's
changing story. And we hope he succeeds in
embracing kids by making learning about
Israel both relevant and fun and by offering
Israeli camp scholarships.
His challenge four months after arriving
here is fierce competition for communal dol-
lars, especially in light of Jewish Federation of
Metropolitan Detroit allocation cuts to bal-
ance a major revenue shortfall in the 2003-
2004 general fund.
Still, we live in a generous, Zionist community.
Federation's recent Max M. Fisher Meeting kickoff to
its 2004 Annual Campaign for big givers was the best
ever.
To partner with the JNF is to be a stakeholder in
the land Jews so love. That means investing in the
land to keep it strong.
Robinson's dream is to raise up to $5 million over
the next three years to develop a Detroit Jewish

Community Reservoir in Israel. With so many wor-
thy causes competing for charitable dollars, that won't
be easy. But a kooky dream its not. Dreaming big
often spurs success.
Terrific as the Detroit Jewish community is, it's a
shame we're no longer a front-line player for the JNF.
With Israel's budget dominated by defense and sus-
tenance needs, the JNF is more important than ever
in bringing a living return on loving the land. I I

Jewish women is rising. Fortunately, improvements in
treatment procedures are cutting the actual death rate
from the diseases, but the physical and emotional tolls
— from radiation and chemotherapy as well as from
mastectomy and hysterectomy — are great.
Jews have good cause to worry about genetic study
in this country. Genetic "research" showing the "infe-
riority" of Eastern Europeans was used in the early
part of the 20th century to justify immigration restric-
tions that excluded hundreds of thousands of Jews
from America. They were left to die in the
German concentration camps that Hider,
who cited the same "research," had built.
Now Jews might be concerned that the
research about BRCA as well as on 45 other
conditions such as Gaucher, Canavan and Tay-Sachs
diseases that disproportionately afflict them could be
used to set limitations on insurance coverage.
The House of Representatives should move to enact
the genetic privacy bill the Senate passed earlier this
month to bar insurance companies from that sort of
discrimination. Equally important, the White House

should end its resistance to gene therapy research that
could effectively remedy some of these problems.
In the meantime, Jewish groups should redouble
their efforts in educating our community about the
risks as well as the ethical issues. Programs like
Hadassah's "It's In the Genes" instruction should be
supported. Additionally, because the new data show
that the disease risk is not limited to those with family
histories of breast and ovarian cancer, Jewish groups
should develop counseling programs to help families
decide whether to seek genetic testing and how to
afford the $2,500 or more that the tests cost.
Rabbis should address the moral issues facing
prospective parents who carry the genes for cystic
fibrosis, Gaucher, breast cancer or other inheritable
disease.
In the end, we need to remember that our DNA is
no more perfect or defective than that of any other
group's and that the diseases to which we are prone
are common among all humans. What we need to
concentrate on is handling the issues with wisdom
and compassion.

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EDITORIAL

Jews, Genes And Cancer

A

report last week gave troubling new evi-
dence of the huge risk that breast and ovar-
ian cancer poses for Ashkenazic Jewish
women and renewed the urgency for both
careful thought and vigorous action to deal with a
range of issues that these diseases present.
Some of the issues are personal. Should you be test-
ed for the gene mutations BRCA1 and BRCA2 that
so dramatically menace health? What measures should
at-risk women take? How should they assess the risks
of bearing children with the same muta-
tions?
But other issues demand coherent nation-
al attention. How can we use genetic
research without stigmatizing ethnic groups? What
safeguards individual privacy about test results? Who
should pay for treatment?
At a personal level, the study offered horrifying
data. About one in every 50 Ashkenazic women car-
ries one of the gene mutations, and 80 percent or
more of those women will develop breast or ovarian
cancer — and the rate of cancer incidence for younger

EDIT ORIAL

10/31

2003

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