NEW YORK — Giving to Jewish charities remains strong despite a drop in overall giving to human services, according to a newly released annual survey by The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
The giant of them all, the United Jewish Appeal, holds sixth place among the top 400 U.S. charities, despite a decline in reported income from 1994 to 1995.
Sixteen local Jewish federations including the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation made the 1995 top 400 list, along with Hadassah, the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish nonprofit organizations.
The JCF, ranking seventh among the top 16 federations, fell two points in rankings of total donations to all groups, but the list was skewed because like other local federations the JCF gives some of the money it raises to the UJA.
In fact, annual donations to the JCF grew from $18.6 million in 1994-1995 to $19.04 million in ’95-’96, according to Mike Welch, the JCF’s director of marketing-communications.
“Annual campaigns have been fairly stable,” Welch said. “We’re lucky, because not all communities have seen that.”
Furthermore, the JCF raised money between 1990 and 1995 not only for its annual campaign but for Soviet emigre resettlement through the separate Operation Exodus campaign. The two efforts were combined in ’95-’96.
UJA, which ranked fourth the year before, runs behind only such lions as the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross and the American Cancer Society.
This is good news, according to Gary Tobin, a Jewish philanthropy expert and director of San Francisco’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University.
“That there are so many Jewish philanthropies in the top 400, given the 2 percent [Jewish] population, is always a remarkable story in and of itself,” he said.
The survey found that overall charitable giving in the nation was up 5 percent, enough to make a difference with an inflation rate of 2.8 percent.
Jewish federations held their own. Debra Blum, senior writer for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the UJA and the 16 federations on the list showed virtually no change in their “aggregate,” or total income, from 1994 to 1995.
But the Chronicle’s inclusion of the incomes of UJA and the federations on the same list is misleading.
In concert with UJA, local federations run the central annual Jewish fund-raising campaign. Federations keep some money at home for local service programs and allocate the rest to UJA for Israel and other overseas programs.
Federations report on their tax forms their total fund-raising income, and then allocate part of it to UJA. UJA in turn reports those federation dollars as income on its own tax forms.
This is all legal. But the Chronicle’s survey, which relied on those tax forms for its data, in effect inflates some Jewish charitable dollars and underestimates others.
For Don Kent, the associate executive director of development at the Council for Jewish Federations, the survey is confusing and does not do justice to actual Jewish giving.
It “does not reflect the full fund-raising achievement because it is inconsistent,” he said.
In particular, Kent said about half of the 16 federations listed have some or all of their endowment funds in separate corporations, which are not included in the tax forms that the survey studied.
The JCF’s Jewish Community Endowment Fund is not separate.
Kent called the endowment funds “the fastest-growing part of federation income.” The survey, he added, is therefore reporting “a false low.”
For its part, UJA reported a 9.3 percent decline from 1994 to 1995, with total income down from $382 million to $346.7 million.
But as with last year’s reporting, which saw a 6 percent drop from 1993 to 1994, UJA officials said the figure reflects the drop-off in dollars at the end of the special five-year $900,000 Exodus campaign.
Giving is already growing, added Gerald Nagel, UJA spokesman. Donations rose between ’95 and ’96 from $346 million to $359 million, while 1997 already shows an increase, he said.
Tobin was optimistic. “The federations are going through a fundamental reassessment and if they hold their own over the next five years, they will come out much stronger,” he said.
“They’ll have to seize issues that matter most to Jews,” Tobin added, including Israel and Jewish communities and education.
The survey showed how charities are faring in raising private dollars, and does not reflect public funds they may receive.
The top 400 list includes:
New York: 29 (down from 25); Chicago: 65 (up from 73); Detroit: 148 (up from 216); Boston: 166 (down from 159); Pittsburgh: 172 (up from 243); Los Angeles: 177 (down from 151); Cleveland: 189 (down from 142); Philadelphia: 213 (down from 167); San Francisco: 227 (down from 225); Baltimore: 249 (up from 255); Miami: 291 (up from 332); Atlanta: 327 (up from 362); MetroWest, N.J.: 328 (down from 286); Milwaukee: 336 (on the list for the first time); West Palm Beach, Fla.: 350 (down from 307); Washington: 351 (down from 333).
Other nonprofits on the top 400 included the Jewish Communal Fund in New York; Hadassah; Yeshiva University; the Anti-Defamation League; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; the Jewish National Fund; the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York.