DISGUSTING: The Stark Reality Behind Many Jewish Fundraising Campaigns
by Monsey.info
The Jewish world is a very giving one, with people opening up their hearts and wallets each day to help others in need. Yet where there is opportunity, there is fraud.
Hebrew language news outlet The Marker found that some of the fundraising campaigns being advertised across the Jewish world to be questionable, and began doing some digging. What they discovered was absolutely shocking.
“The industry behind “Yocheved has kidney disease” and “Yossi needs heart surgery” is a murky one,” the Marker wrote in their explosive expose, “peopled with activists, journalists and broadcasters who milk charities and divide loot among themselves. At best, the remaining crumbs go to the needy.”
These heart rending advertisements can be found on nearly every Jewish news website, radio, and publication, featuring a sad looking photo, some eye catching text, and a story of sorrow and woe that would make anyone cry.
Sometimes, these campaigns come with letters from Rabbonim vouching for the authenticity of the story, sometimes not.
Yet what was discovered by The Marker’s Gur Megiddo was that while some of these campaigns were actually for those in legitimately need, as little as 2% of the proceeds actually made it to the beneficiaries, with as much as 98% being divided among the advertisers and other campaign “expenses”.
The breathtaking numbers show just how extensive these scams go. In one incident, an Israeli non-profit campaigned for medical expenses for twenty six patients, but when auditors requested information on them, eighteen out of the twenty six were “lost”. Of the remaining eight cases, a total of NIS 8.8 Million was collected. of that, only NIS 950,000 was actually ever given to the beneficiaries. Where did the rest go?
In another incident reported by The Marker, a campaign titled “Saving Yocheved” brought in NIS 5 Million. The campaign, which was supposed to raise funds for a woman’s urgent surgery for a kidney transplant, paid out just NIS 116,000. That’s just 2% of the money donated. The other 98% of the money went to the mechanism around it, to well-known radio programs, media consultants and procurers of rabbinic support, according to The Marker.
When faced down with the reality of these unethical ads, advertisers such as radio hosts and publications are punting responsibility, claiming that it is not their job to verify that the advertisements they are hosting are legitimate.
“Our communities have a serious problem on our hands,” Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt tweeted regarding the expose. “The lack of fiscal transparency in religious nonprofits, the ease with which corruption happens at the expense of innocent donors, and the systemic cover-up of this. Certainly, not all charities are the same but this case shows how sizable, easy and broad a charity fraud can be.”
Another expose by CrownHeights.info in March of this year exposed a smaller fundraising scam spanning hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple years, yet the lessons from these incidents have still yet to be learned by the Jewish community.
