Hashem Helps the Givers, Parts I and II
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Wednesday, October 18, 2006Part I
In 1971, a Chassidishe yungerman with $500 in extra money from his wedding decided to start a gemach. By the late ‘80s, that gemach was lending over ten million dollars a year.
How did a second-grade rebbe, with no substantial personal resources of his own, come to run a gemach of that magnitude? That was the question that I faced when I came to write about Rabbi Shmuel Avraham Myski, zt"l, for the Jewish Observer, shortly after his too early passing.
Ultimately, the only answer I could offer was: When a person has an overwhelming desire to give to others, HaKadosh Baruch provides him the means to do so � and on a scale beyond anything that could have been contemplated initially. Rabbi Myski certainly possessed that overwhelming desire to give. He was accused, not without with some justice, of trying to grab all the chesed in Monsey for himself. . He did not wait to be asked for loans, but sought out those in need. He noticed, for instance, that a local shoe store was not properly stocked for the peak Pesach season, and deduced that the owner had exhausted all his credit. A loan was forthcoming without ever having been sought.
The lessons learned from Rabbi Myski’s remarkable life came back to me recently during a series of visits to Yad Eliezer’s Jerusalem headquarters. About the dedication of the organization’s founders Rabbi Yaakov Weisel and his wife Hadassah there can be no question. Fourteen years ago, robbers broke into the Weisels’ apartment in Jerusalem’s Ezras Torah neighborhood.
By unhappy chance, Rabbi Weisel, who had never before kept any substantial sum of money in the house, had just received a large cash contribution. He knew that he was under no halachic obligation to endanger his life, but the thought of all those who would benefit from the money prevented him from handing it over. The robbers stabbed him 21 times, missing major blood vessels by millimeters, before fleeing with an empty safe.
Today Yad Eliezer is an empire of chesed, providing $15,000,000 a year in assistance to some of Israel’s poorest families. But it started from nothing more than a simple impulse to help some neighbors in need. Twenty-eight years ago, Mrs. Hadassah Weisel sent one of her daughters door-to-door to collect food for a neighbor with a number of disabled children and her own major health problems.
Each such trip brought back news of other such families in similar need. Soon the Weisel daughters were supplemented by a whole corps of neighborhood girls. Today Yad Eliezer has thousands of volunteers all around Israel collecting food and provides food worth over $4,000,000 annually to close to 100,000 Israeli Jews, through its monthly food baskets, weekly meals to the home bound, and special holiday distributions.
Yad Eliezer’s infant formula program began in a similarly humble fashion. Mrs. Weisel noticed a neighborhood woman whose infant son could not hold his head up. After discreet inquiries, she ascertained that the baby’s malnourished mother could not nurse, and to save money, she was diluting the infant formula with three times more water than recommended. As a result, the infant suffered from an acute vitamin deficiency. Yad Eliezer today supplies 1,800 mothers who cannot nurse for one reason or another with all the formula needed.
Many in chutz l’aretz know Yad Eliezer best from the advertisements urging those making weddings for their own children to adopt the wedding of a poor couple in Israel. The cost of the latter is only a fraction of that of dessert alone at more lavish affairs in chutz l’aretz.
To date the organization has made over 10,000 weddings in this fashion. (The adopt-a-wedding idea has since been expanded to an adopt-a-bar mitzvah program to purchase tefillin for impoverished Israeli boys.) Two years ago, the organization purchased two wedding halls in Jerusalem for nearly $4,000,000, which allows them to further reduce the costs to the poorest families and offer relief to "middle class" Torah families. The stigma to fully subsidized families is also removed since the halls are used for all kinds of families.
Like most of Yad Eliezer’s programs, the wedding program also began with a single individual in need. A young woman came to the Weisels’ door collecting coins in a nylon sandwich bag for hachnasas kallah. She told Rabbi Weisel that she herself was the kallah. Her father had been unable to meet his financial commitments, and she was afraid that her equally poor chassan would break the engagement.
About seven years ago, the Weisel’s son Dov, visited a ba’alas teshuva raising a son on her own. Even though there was no food in the house, she told him that her greatest concern was that her son had no one with whom to learn Gemara.
Dov found an avreich to learn with the boy. It occurred to him that there must be many other young boys with no supportive male figure in their lives. A small $150,000 pilot program proved so successful that a full-scale Big Brother Program was developed. Today 3,500 boys between the ages of 8 and 13 spend at least three hours a week with an avreich, who not only learns with them but becomes fully involved in every aspect of their lives. Another 1,200 are waiting to get into the program. The total budget of the program is around $3,000,000, of which well over 80% provides much needed supplemental income to avreichim. Again, a single case became the impetus for a major program.
How did what started as a handful of private chesed endeavors by one couple develop into Yad Eliezer? As with Rabbi Myski, the only answer is: siyata d’shamaya. But that kind of siyata d’shmaya does not come to everyone. Dov Weisel tells a story that goes a long way to explaining that of his parents.
A few years ago, he was sitting with a group of substantial contributors when a poor man knocked on the office door. Dov asked him to wait, as he was in a meeting. At that point, his father took him aside, and told him, "Never forget that the poor man is the important one. He is the purpose of this organization. The gvirim are only important because they can help him."
Part II
How do some small-scale chesed organizations grow to become major organizations? The difference, after all, is not merely one of scale. Running a gemach with total assets of $500, for instance, has little to do with running one lending ten million dollars annually, involving more than a dozen bank accounts, and a full-time staff.
Similarly, nothing in the backgrounds of Rabbi Yaakov Weisel and his wife Hadassah, a maggid shiur and a housewife, respectively, suggested the ability to transform their collection campaigns for various neighbors into a multi-million dollar chesed organization.
Yet, in the first case, Rabbi Shmuel Avraham Myski, zt"l, seamlessly made the transition to chief executive of the world's largest gemach, mastering such arcane subjects as federal bankruptcy law along the way. Every aspect of his gemach reflected his careful attention to detail. The rooms in which loan applicants were interviewed, for instance, were each sound-proofed and had music piped in so that there was no chance of what was said in one room being heard in another.
And Yad Eliezer, has proven itself a highly efficient organization. Each year Yad Eliezer collects approximately a million dollars of produce from farmers who would have otherwise burned it or left it in the field to rot. Had Yad Eliezer not been capable of collecting such a large quantity of produce and distributing it to the neediest sectors of the population, the Agriculture Ministry would never have offered its assistance.
One tax inspector, after days spent going over Yad Eliezer's books, left his own contribution, in recognition of the organization's meticulous financial record-keeping as well as its work.
When the impulse to benefit others is pure, Hashem provides the organizational know-how to give full vent to that impulse.
STILL HOW DO PEOPLE OF NO SIGNIFICANT PERSONAL MEANS and possessing no experience in fundraising gather the money needed to fulfill their chesed ambitions? Answer: They find many good Jews eager to become their partners. In the short-run, Klal Yisrael may occasionally be fooled � indeed there sometimes seems to be an inverse relationship between an organization's fundraising success and its actual accomplishments. But in the long-run, Klal Yisrael's judgment about those most worthy of support is unerring.
Rabbi Chaim Goldberg, for instance, raises and distributes millions of dollars every year in Jerusalem. A social worker I know well claims that she has never called him to discuss a client where he did not know the family, often better than she did. No wonder that some of the richest frum Jews in the world send him large sums every year. They know that they will get the best possible return on their tzedakah dollar, and that every cent will reach its intended recipients.
In the early days of Yad Eliezer, Rabbi Weisel asked a friend of his who was traveling to America to try to interest potential donors. The friend made no commitment, and, in fact, spoke to only two potential donors. But one of those was Zolly Tropper. He and his wife Sori have dedicated themselves to Yad Eliezer night and day for the past 26 years, not only opening up a wide array of American contacts but also providing much of the business and organizational acumen responsible for the organization's phenomenal growth.
Last year, Yad Eliezer's Special Emergency Fund distributed nearly three million dollars. A "story" comes into the office, and Weisel immediately knows which one of Yad Eliezer's regular donors will respond and find others to share in the mitzvah.
On my most recent visit to the office, the "stories" included that of a ger, who after five years of Torah learning already knows most of Mishnah Berurah by heart, preparing to marry a Russian ba'alas teshuva. Neither have a penny to their name. They left with enough for the basic necessities to start married life. The wife of a ba’al teshuva learning in kollel, whose baby needed an emergency eye operation received the money she needed. (I cannot publish even more gripping stories from that morning out of privacy considerations.)
WHEREVER ONE SEES PHENOMENAL GROWTH IN CHESED, there one can expect to see open Hashgacha Pratis. Rabbi Myski had a standing commitment that all those who loaned Keren HaChesed money could have their money back on a few days notice. There were days he awakened with hundreds of thousands of dollars in commitments due and no clue where the money would come from. But he used to say, "If I start the say happy, then I know I'll have siyata d'Shmaya." And so it was. The gemach never defaulted on a commitment.
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky once told Dov Weisel not to accept a donation from an individual, from whom he had anticipated a very large gift. The next week an avreich in Manchester, England, who runs an annual Purim collection for Yad Eliezer, called to say that a certain individual, who insisted on remaining absolutely anonymous, had approached him about making a one-time donation of $250,000 to Yad Eliezer.
The Jerusalem municipality gave Yad Eliezer an old bomb shelter for its offices. Dov had a hard time reconciling himself to spending $80,000 of badly needed tzedakah money on refurbishing the structure. Just then, a lawyer whom he did not know, called to say that he represented the estate of someone who had just died and willed money to Yad Eliezer. (No one in Yad Eliezer had ever met this donor.) The only condition was there must be a dedication plaque.
At first, Dov could not think of anything in Yad Eliezer suitable for a plaque. Then it hit him � the new offices. And the size of the bequest? Exactly $80,000.
