Carole Solomon’s Sacred Mission

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In Israel with the first woman to chair the United Jewish Appeal.

By Barbara Sofer


No purses at breakfast.
   
The sign in the Jerusalem Hilton’s marbled lobby is a reminder to participants in the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) mission to Israel last November that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to attend this morning’s briefing: Security will be tight.
   The private dining room smells of coffee, fresh pastry, goat cheese. The 100 or so men and women quietly discussing Israel’s future are not professional political strategists. They are philanthropists, each of whom has made major contributions in the past to the UJA. For five days they have been taken behind the scenes in Israel: powwows with the governor of the Bank of Israel, a tour of a secret anti-terrorist base, a private performance by a controversial dance troupe that had refused to perform at Israel’s Jubilee after being asked to put on more clothing.
   Standing as hostess is Carole Abramson Solomon, CW’60, the first woman to become national chair of the UJA in the charity’s 60-year history. Wearing a mock-suede navy-blue pantsuit, small pearl earrings, and her ever-present gold Lion of Judah pin, Solomon is lean and attractive. Her amiable manner and easy smile are offset by ever-vigilant hazel eyes, tensed shoulders. Apart from the festivity of breaking croissants among friends, she is responsible for raising the awesome sum of $1.5 billion this year. Pledge by pledge, check by check. If all goes well today, this small group of donors could pledge as much as $10 million after breakfast. The money is badly needed for projects cushioning immigration, feeding hungry Jews in Eastern Europe, sheltering abused children, and bringing American teenagers to Israel to boost their “immunity” to assimilation.
   There is a hitch. It turns out that Netanyahu, locked in angry negotiations with his cabinet over the Wye Plantation agreement, won’t be attending the briefing after all. Solomon sighs. The money will just have to be raised without a prime minister warming the atmosphere.
   On a personal level, Solomon’s disappointment is less acute. She has met with Netanyahu many times and will see him again at least once the following week, when she plays a key role at the General Assembly — a large gathering of North American Jewish leaders, also in Jerusalem. Meeting heads of state is a common, if never quite routine, part of her job. A month earlier, Solomon had had an audience with the Pope. Last summer, while touring Azerbaijan, she had a private conference with President Heydar Aliyev, at which, she says, “the real or perceived power of the UJA” crystallized for her. “I was credentializing — telling him that our annual budget was 1.5 billion dollars — when his pupils dilated,” Solomon recalls. “I realized that our annual budget was as big as his country’s yearly exports.”

   Solomon was touring the country — she has also been in Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Ukraine, the Crimea, and Uzbek-histan — to check out UJA’s projects in the region. UJA money is spent on Jewish nursery schools, medical equipment, Hebrew study centers, Jewish summer camps, and hot meals for the elderly. But President Aliyev had his own agenda: He asked Carole Solomon to intervene with the U.S. government on his behalf to advance his country’s favored trade status.
   Which pleased Solomon: “Ultimately it’s good for the potentially vulnerable Jews of a country that their leader perceives that they have powerful allies who care about their interests,” she explains. “It hasn’t always been that way.”
   The UJA was hastily organized after Kristalnacht, the large-scale attack on Jewish property in Germany and Austria in November 1938, but American Jewry were ineffectual at rescuing their brethren from the Nazis. That memory has haunted American Jews. Over the last half-century, as their financial resources and confidence grew, vast sums were raised for Israel and imperiled communities. The UJA became the chief vehicle for fundraising, its annual campaign taking in funds from 151 local Jewish federations and 450 independent communities and channeling it to two social service agencies: the Jewish Agency for Israel in Jerusalem and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York City.
   Raising colossal sums for crises, the UJA became the envy of other charitable funds. Nonetheless, the UJA Solomon has taken over has never been so freighted with challenges. American Jews who see photos of Israelis with cell-phones and meet them traveling abroad aren’t so sure that Israel needs their help anymore. Immigration has slowed from the former Soviet Union and few Jews remain in Ethiopia. A plethora of smaller charities compete for Jewish funds, often promising lower overhead — a pledge that is hard to substantiate. According to independent rankings of charities like the one in Money magazine, the UJA is among the top organizations in terms of percentage of money reaching recipients (more than 94 percent).
   “We need to have general funds ready to respond quickly to crises in Jewish history. At the same time, donors often pick a particular project they want to support,” Solomon says. Still, convincing Jews — particularly young ones — that Jewish needs are pressing and that the UJA is the way to meet them is never easy. Any negative publicity hits hard. On the very day that Solomon was meeting with the major donors in Jerusalem, a muckraking article in Israel’s biggest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, pilloried a supposed UJA official (he actually worked for another organization) for his allegedly excessive salary.
   “This kind of attack tars our organization,” Solomon says, her voice parched with anger. “Who wouldn’t hate to think his money was being squandered?” The UJA has also become a target of dissatisfied Conservative and Reform Jews, who want to show their anger over efforts by ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel to deny the legitimacy of their Judaism.
   “Ninety percent of our givers are Conservative and Reform,” Solomon says. “I try to make them realize that punishing the sick, frail, vulnerable isn’t the right way to express their anger. We’re strictly humanitarian, and no one does as much to support the various religious streams in Israel as we.” Her logic doesn’t always prevail. In a renegade move last year, several federations withheld UJA-bent contributions to spend at their own discretion.
   Anyone who has ever done fundraising — from selling Girl Scout cookies to applying for grants — knows the sting of having a real or figurative door slammed in his or her face. How can Solomon stand being turned down?
   “I can’t say I’ve never lost it — I have,” she admits. “Although I shouldn’t — ever. The hardest part for me is knowing that a refusal from a donor means kids won’t go to summer camp or that a family will be hungry. I try not to be judgmental, and to see fundraising as a work in progress. I want to leave each round with the dignity of the potential donor and my own dignity intact.”

On the other hand, she has pressed the UJA’s fundraisers to be bountiful in their gratitude. “Some [fundraisers] used to see the UJA as an annual tax” rather than a voluntary contribution, she says. “I appreciate every donation. We get a lot of checks for $18 dollars. All our contributors deserve respect.”
   The most effective means of counteracting negative publicity is to get donors out in the field to see where their money is going — be it a Hebrew school in Odessa or an underground bomb shelter that has become an immigrant teen center in Israel. Some 11,000 people travel on educational tours with the UJA to Eastern Europe and Israel each year. Solomon herself has led a dozen missions.
   A project she particularly likes to show off these days is Hitec, a cluster of high-tech “incubators” in Jerusalem where immigrant scientists and Israelis have a protective nest in which to try their ideas in start-up companies before confronting the big bad global market. In addition to its political, religious, and security problems, Jerusalem also suffers from the flight of talent to more cosmopolitan Tel Aviv and the United States. It is already the poorest of Israel’s big cities. Solomon personally brokered a connection between New York’s Jewish community and Jerusalem. New York’s Jewish Federation (under a Jewish Agency program called Partnership 2000) provides money and hands-on advice for start-ups.
   On a visit to Hitec in the steel-and-glass Har Hotzvim industrial park on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Solomon drops in at Mango Computers, a producer of computer boards. Eight of the 16 employees are new immigrants. Three computer jocks — immigrants from Iran, Ukraine, and Canada — get up from their terminals to explain what the boards can do.
   Later, she makes a quick visit across Jerusalem to a former chicken farm where Den-X, one of Hitec’s fledgling companies, has landed after emerging from the incubator. Her face flushes with pride as she gets an explanation of a computerized dental-training unit, DenSim, that was tested and later purchased by the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania as part of its exploration of new technologies. With DenSim, students work on a stylized mannequin lying in a “dental chair” between two computers. One of the computers shows the ideal solution to, say, filling a cavity in a right bicuspid; the second beeps whenever the future dentist makes an irrevocable mistake, like drilling into the pulp. Solomon’s questions are so knowledgeable that the demonstrator, not knowing exactly who she is, wonders if she is a dentist. “No, but my father was,” she says, with a smile.

No one knows better than Carole Solomon the impact a UJA trip to Israel can have.
   She grew up in Philadelphia’s Oak Park section, the daughter of Dr. Paul and Dorothy Abramson. After graduating from Penn, she remained in Philadelphia and married. On Yom Kippur in 1973, when Israel was caught unprepared for a massive attack by the armies of Egypt and Syria, Solomon was bringing up two small children. A visit to embattled Israel was organized by the local UJA, and she was invited to join, even though she had been a relatively small contributor up to that time. “I was hesitant,” she recalls. “The UJA person who invited me insisted that, if I turned down the trip, the two weeks of my life would go by anyway, and I’d never remember them. If I went on the mission, these might be the most important weeks of my life. He was right.”
   Solomon landed in a blacked-out country where reserve forces were still mobilized. Everyday services like oil delivery were disrupted because trucks and drivers remained at the front. Thousands of families were mourning their dead.
   On the darkened streets of Jerusalem, Solomon experienced an epiphany. “Face to face with the realities, I realized how close we’d been to losing Israel. I was deeply shaken. I lived in the U.S., the most privileged Jewish community in history. Our kids weren’t on the line. The very least we could do is send financial support. I was going to make sure we did.”
   Solomon’s sacred mission has empowered her for 15 years. She returned to Philadelphia ready to take on every job — collating, fundraising, dealing with public relations, planning benefits — that would bring in needed funds. Smart and energetic, she moved up fast, and was soon named Women’s Division chair and co-chair of major gifts for the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry. She trained on the job, emulating administrators she admired and avoiding the bad habits of others. At Penn, she’d majored in English and political science. The UJA was her graduate school. “Years in the UJA have been the equivalent of the doctorate in psychology and an MBA,” she says.

Still, all the education in the world is no substitute for passion, Solomon maintains. “When I lecture to young people, I always tell them that the lesson I’ve learned above all in this job is that you have to care desperately about what you’re doing or you’ll get too overwhelmed with the problems.”
   Solomon doesn’t discuss the size of her own contribution, but the gold Lion of Judah pin she wears daily marks her as having made a permanent endowment by a gift of $100,000 or more to the annual campaign.
   “When I meet a woman — at a professional meeting or a concert — and she’s wearing that pin I feel an immediate kinship. Its says something positive about her attachment to the Jewish people,” says Solomon.
   In 1946, the UJA started a separate Women’s Campaign to encourage women to give charity in their own names, the idea being that their credibility and power as leaders would be enhanced by signing the checks. Women’s giving is the fastest-growing annual-campaign segment. “Men are less ready to tamper with a formula that has been successful before. Women say, ‘Let’s try this,'” says Solomon.
   Still, it took more than another half- century for a woman to occupy the UJA’s top position. “It’s not an accident that the last major job in the Jewish world to be held by a woman has to do with the largest financial resources,” Solomon says. “To make it to the top, a woman has to be as good as a man and then some. Traditionally, men have dominated budget decisions and have left women to deal with the ‘touchy-feely’ side.”
   Solomon, who chaired the budget committee before moving to the executive ranks, has no problem curling up with a thick fiscal report and crunching the numbers. Not that she doesn’t like touchy-feely. Within moments of visiting a Jerusalem caravan site of Ethiopian immigrants, she’s surrounded. The story of an abused child, in Minsk, Tulsa, or Beersheba can move her to tears. On a recent visit to Kiev in the Ukraine, she trekked up six flights to visit an octogenarian recipient of a food package that included kasha, oil, coffee, rice, and Hanukkah candles. The elderly woman had blown out the candles before they could burn very far — saving them for next year, in case the UJA didn’t come through. “That was a powerful moment for me,” Solomon recalls, with emotion. “We have to be there for her next year. I promised myself that we would be.”
   Twenty-five years after her transforming visit to Israel, Solomon, now divorced and a grandmother, lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a subway ride from her office on Eighth Avenue. In the last year, UJA has merged with the Council of Jewish Federations, the network of community leadership, to make fundraising more efficient and to get more people involved in the process. The annual campaign Solomon heads is now officially the UJA Federation Annual Campaign. “We’re going to be leaner, meaner, more focused,” Solomon promises. Initial fundraising figures look good — with the UJA reporting a 10 percent growth in average gifts over last year. “That ought to debunk the rumor that the campaign is flat,” Solomon says.
   Keeping well-informed is a personal priority. She despises filtered news and has cultivated her own sources, a far-reaching set of friends in Israel and elsewhere in the Jewish world. “American Jews can’t be protected from the realities of Israel,” she says. Her days often stretch into evening meetings and fundraising events. Rare is the week when she doesn’t have to fly somewhere for a speaking engagement within the U.S., inspect one of UJA’s projects in 59 other countries, or otherwise advance the organization’s agenda — as with her trip to Italy to speak to Pope John Paul II.
   “I wanted to encourage the Pope to visit Israel for the millennium celebrations. I feels he needs to see Israel close-up. It’s easy to make pronouncements from Rome when you haven’t seen Israel yourself.” She wore a black suit with a modest skirt. To her relief the meeting was scheduled for the summer palace, less physically imposing than the Vatican. “The Pope speaks good English and was very pleasant, human,” she says. “His health seemed more fragile than I expected.”
   Catholic friends and neighbors had plied her with rosary beads to be blessed and she sheepishly asked the Pope to bless them. It was a moment she’d never anticipating growing up in a Jewish home in Philadelphia: her hands overflowing with rosary beads being blessed by the Pope. “I had visited Cuba the day after he made his historic visit there, and he was pleased to hear the feedback of his impact [that] I could report from the people,” she says.
   As national chair of the UJA, Carole Solomon earns not a dollar or a shekel for her efforts. She is a volunteer. “No one could afford me,” she laughs. “I feel privileged to be in a secure enough financial position to be able to do this.”
   Still, working your kishkes off — for free — that’s a hard one for young people to get today. Over lunch recently, an Israeli high-school student from Haifa asked Solomon to describe what she did. Solomon talked about giving speeches, making pitches, conducting meetings, making budget decisions, organizing missions, visiting communities and leaders.
   “I want to be like you when I grow up,” said the teenager. But when she found out that Solomon received no salary, she seemed puzzled. When the UJA national chair got up to indulge in a piece of chocolate cake from the buffet, the teenager leaned over and whispered. “Tell me — does she also work?”


Barbara Sofer, CW’71, lives in Jerusalem. She is the author of the novel, The Thirteenth Hour.

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