Year In Review/America Photo by Nefesh B'Netesh As we celebrate this New Year 5769, _ Eight first-generation Israeli babies at a Yom HaAtzmaut celebration on April 29. We wish joy and good health To you and your loved ones . Scott Leemaster President Allan "Geli" Gelfond East Central Regional Director Jo Strausz Rosen Detroit Chapter Director Barb Zeevi Administrative Assistant v AVM American Technion Society 30230 Orchard Lake Road, Suite 155 Farmington Hills, MI 48334 detroit@ats.org 248.737.1990 Best Wishes to our Customers & Friends for a Healthy & Happy New Year! 4052 Haggerty • Walled Lake • (248) 360 0190 - don't miss a single issue of p latinum 1N LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE the first Thursday of every month A86 September 25 • 2008 Ai slide in stock and real estate markets could force them to cut their allocations Samuel Dubbin,.the Florida attorney and significantly. former Department of Justice official push- At the annual gathering of the Jewish ing the bill, contends that the right to sue is Funders Network, held in April in fundamental and should not be abridged. Jerusalem, philanthropists and founda- He also charges that the official body cre- tion professionals openly expressed ated to resolve the insurance issue, the concern that a philanthropic recession International Commission on Holocaust was coming. Era Insurance Claims, or ICHEIC, was a "People are beginning to be nervous, failure, paying out only a fraction of the especially in places where the economy estimated value of Jewish insurance poli- is so based on banking and real estate,' cies held before the wax said Richard Marker, an independent Not surprisingly, the European insur- philanthropy adviser and a professor of ance industry has lobbied hard to defeat philanthropy at New York University. "And the bill. But Dubbin and his client, the I don't think that the Jewish community Holocaust Survivors Foundation, also is going to be exempt. There is going to be have found themselves engaged in leg- tremendous pressure on both the philan- islative combat with the largest Jewish thropists and the nonprofit world:' groups and the Claims Conference, At the same time, the dollar's decline the principal Jewish organization for hit Jewish groups operating overseas. In Holocaust restitution. July, for example, the Reform movement Those groups claim that the flood of announced that because of the falter- potential lawsuits would do little to help ing dollar, its Israel center was facing a survivors and would jeopardize ongoing major budget shortfall. The movement restitution negotiations with European issued a mass appeal for assistance, say- companies andgovernments. ing it needed $500,000 to "save" its Israel The fight has grown increasingly 'operation, which was facing a decline of acrimonious. An official of the Claims more than 30 percent in its budget. Conference accused Dubbin of unreal- • "We're going to find out who the istically raising the survivors' expecta- strong and the weak are. Ifs an almost tioris in the hopes of reaping millions in Darwinian survival of the fittest:' said legal fees. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., a Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American chief backer of the bill, wondered dur- Jewish history at Brandeis University. ing a congressional hearing in February Though the faltering economy is cast- how Jewish leaders could sleep at night ing a long shadow in the waning days of knowing they were preventing survivors 5768, the year was .not without celebra- from being compensated for defaulted tions. policies. In November, the community marked Advocates for the legislation have said the 20th anniversary of the struggle for the bill would benefit needy Holocaust Soviet Jewry, a campaign that mobilized survivors, many of whom may find tens of thousands of Jews across the themselves with even less communal country on a scale unequaled before or support in the coming year if the falter- since. What began as a student-led effort ing economy hits the Jewish philan- in the 1960s blossomed into a worldwide thropic world as hard as some expect. movement, leading to the largest Jewish Economic concerns have risen to the exodus in history and, some say, playing forefront of the Jewish agenda as 5768 a role in the ultimate fall of the Soviet draws to a close. In the wake of the March Union. collapse of Bear Stearns, a major Wall Henry Feingold, the author of a Street bank and a significant source of recently published work on the struggle, Jewish charitable financing, philanthropy summed it up: "It was probably professionals worried that a continued American Jewry's finest hone ❑ 5768: America from page A85