JCF’S COMMUNITY GIFT

Our primary responsibility is to serve the more than 3,000 donors who have entrusted us with their charitable dollars. We honor this commitment to our donors by providing services that make their charitable giving administratively efficient, economically advantageous, and personally rewarding.

But the Jewish Communal Fund takes its mission a step further.

Each year the Board of Trustees of the Jewish Communal Fund makes a Community Gift from its operating and endowment funds to support programs and institutions that promote the welfare and security of the Jewish community at home and abroad.

Our Community Gift has two components: a $2 million donation to the Annual Campaign of UJA-Federation of New York and grants from the JCF Special Gifts Fund. Since 1999, more than $7 million has been distributed from the Special Gifts Fund to over a dozen worthy causes selected with the assistance of UJA-Federation of NY. They include:

• Capital campaigns of the Edith and Carl Marks Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, the JCC of Staten Island, and the JCC in Manhattan;
• A kosher kitchen and dining facility at Brooklyn College’s Hillel House;
• The establishment of Plaza Jewish Community Chapel – the first community-owned Jewish funeral home in New York;
• The Émigré Retraining Loan Program at the Hebrew Free Loan Society, which helps highly educated, underemployed new immigrants to finance their vocational or professional education;
• Dorot’s Information and Program Services Center, serving New York’s elderly;
•  A Jewish spiritual and healing center at the Mollie and Jack Zicklin Jewish Hospice Residence in Riverdale;
• Project RE-IMAGINE, an initiative that will enable 20 area synagogues to examine and reshape their congregational religious schools;
• UJA-Federation/F.E.G.S. Trust for the Disabled;
• Emergency grants to provide aid to the Argentinean Jewish community and to support the Israel Crisis Center in Jerusalem.
• A recreation center for disadvantaged youth at the JBFCS Henry Ittleson Center in Riverdale;
• Hillel’s Collegiate Leadership Internship Program (CLIP), designed to develop the next generation of Jewish professional and lay leadership.
• Renovation of the recreation facilities at Ramapo for Children, a unique camp for children with a wide range of special needs.

Note to fundraisers:

Projects supported by our Special Gifts Fund are chosen by our Board of Trustees from recommendations made by UJA-Federation of New York.  The Jewish Communal Fund does not review funding proposals, nor do we pass these on to our donors.