Danny Siegel greets Milly Iris, whose Herb Iris Youth and Family Philanthropy Endowment supports the Iris Teen Tzedaka Program.
Photos courtesy Michal Greenbaum
Advertisement
February 12, 2009
One of Danny Siegel’s earliest heroes was someone he calls “the Chicken Lady of Jerusalem.”
Upset at the poverty and hunger she saw around her, Jerusalem resident Clara Hammer started buying chickens for needy neighbors.
“She is 98 years old now,” Siegel told NJJN as he sat in a seminar room at the Whippany offices of the Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life of MetroWest. “She still buys chickens for a couple of hundred families a week. In Hebrew they call her ‘the mother of all chickens.’”
Hammer is typical of the “mitzva heroes” that Siegel, a poet and tireless Jewish educator, has championed for almost three decades.
Founder in 1981 of the Ziv Tzedakah Fund, Siegel is animated by a simple belief that “money can change people’s lives for the better; restore dignity; provide jobs, food, freedom, well-being for desperate people; and, most of all, offer hope,” he said.
Some 28 years later, he is urging young Jewish people to follow his lead by seeking out their own mitzva heroes, a collection of people on both sides of the Atlantic who “are absolutely reliable and doing great things, and doing them with low overhead.”
It is a message he delivered on Monday night to members of the Iris Teen Tzedaka Program, an arm of the Herb Iris Youth and Family Philanthropy Endowment.
The program trains 36 post-bar and -bat mitzva students in the culture and practice of philanthropy. The teen program is run jointly by United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest, and the Partnership.
Danny Siegel flanked by Jacob Scheer, a second-year Iris Teen Tzedaka adviser, and his sister, Ariel Scheer, the service learning intern at The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life.
Until he closed down Ziv a year ago, Siegel and Ziv’s Millburn-based administrator, Naomi Eisenberger, had raised as much as $1.9 million for small “boutique” charities in Israel and elsewhere. (Eisenberger went on to found the Good People Fund.)
It’s not that Siegel doesn’t trust large charities. But ever since he made a trip to Israel in 1975, he has been drawn to people “with a minimum of operational procedures and bureaucracy as well as a record of exceptional fiscal responsibility, who make good works happen in a most striking manner.”
Giving more wisely
During the course of nearly three decades, his nonprofit fund was supported by “others who gave me money that I gave away. Then I filed a report with the IRS. In the early days the largest contribution we ever got was $10,000.”
In all, Ziv raised more than $12 million, funding both Jewish and non-Jewish programs.
Long after meeting the “Chicken Lady,” Siegel said, he still finds heroes in Israel, even in times of deep stress.
During the 2006 war in Lebanon, and again last month after the invasion of Gaza, he came upon many “just plain good people” who were willing to open their homes to strangers who were fleeing from areas under attack, “no questions asked.”
Despite what he called “the Madoff thing” and the tanking world economy — both big threats to philanthropic giving — Siegel said he believes there are still charitable dollars out there.
“Part of what has to be done is rethinking by the fund-raisers,” he said. “Did they build a big part of their budget on the donations of the big givers? For people who see a chunk of their retirement money out the window, they will have to think how to give their tzedaka money more wisely.”
He said he advises teenagers to select the beneficiaries of their charitable dollars and volunteer efforts by asking themselves some basic questions: “‘What do you like to do? What are you good at? What is really killing you about what’s wrong with the world?’ That should help them focus on something that appeals to them.”
Motivated by a father who was “an old-time country doctor” in Arlington, Va., Siegel’s commitment to repairing the world began when he served as a leader of United Synagogue Youth, the Conservative movement’s teen group.
After earning a degree in literature at Columbia University and in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Siegel gravitated toward his two great loves: writing and philanthropy. His 29 books include collections of poetry and how-to guides like Giving Your Money Away and Heroes and Mitzvah Workers.
“I fund myself always on the road lecturing on Jewish things,” he said.
As he considered all the time he has devoted to helping others — and helping them to help even more — Siegel spoke wistfully.
“What could be bad being around great people? Their greatness is the wholehearted devotion to the well-being of others.”
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
--TOP--
