Slum-Touring Millionaires Put Off The Ritz In Israel

'Hands On Tzedakah' takes would-be Western donors off the beaten track to see the underbelly of Israeli society.

Slum-touring millionaires put off the Ritz in Israel
'Hands On Tzedakah' takes would-be donors off the beaten track to see the underbelly of society.
By MATTHEW KALMAN • Jerusalem Post
 
Ronald L. Gallatin is a retired attorney, a CPA and a former managing director at Lehman Brothers credited with creating some of Wall Street’s most ingenious investment instruments. His wife, Meryl, is a prominent philanthropist in Florida charity circles. But when they visit Israel, they prefer hanging around soup kitchens and drug addict drop-in centers rather than fancy restaurants.

Over the past seven years, the Gallatins have given more than $2 million of their own money and raised more than $4m. from friends for a charity they set up “to fill in the cracks” left by social services in the US, Israel and Latin America.

They promise donors that 100 percent of funds will go to the causes listed on their www.handsontzedakah.org website for Hands On Tzedakah, so the Gallatins also absorb all the administrative costs of their charity, including one or more trips each year to Israel.

They use their own money to seed all the projects and then encourage their donors to identify one where their donation should be applied.

The Gallatins are just two clients of Arnie Draiman, a travel guide with a difference.

Draiman takes tourists off the beaten track to show millionaires and other would-be donors the underbelly of Israeli society, helping them target their charity where it will have the most effect.

“I want to teach them how to give their money away efficiently and effectively,” Draiman said.

He said there was an increasing interest among tourists to Israel in welfare and assistance projects – the flip-side of the sun-drenched beaches, nonstop nightlife and centuries-old religious culture projected by official government advertising.

“Our trips aren’t about museum hopping,” Meryl Gallatin told AOL News during a recent visit to Crossroads, a cash-strapped dropin center for at-risk youth in downtown Jerusalem. “We’re here to do due diligence on behalf of our donors. This is a different kind of tourism.”

Not all of Draiman’s tourists are millionaire philanthropists.

Parents bring their bar mitzva boys and bat mitzva girls to tour projects as a lesson in social responsibility.

Newly married couples, flush with their own happiness want to engage with people less fortunate than themselves. American religious and community leaders also come to Draiman to see the reality of Israeli society so they can better understand the country.

At first, some projects didn’t understand why they should host visitors who weren’t about to make a donation. Over time, they have adopted Draiman’s long-term view.

“I have countless examples of people who have visited a place and later gone back and included it in their wedding registry or a bar mitzva boy has included it in his bar mitzva project,” Draiman said.

He said the key to the attraction of his tours is the term “tzedaka” – which combines “righteousness,” “charity” and “justice.”

“I use the word in the broadest terms possible to include not only money but your time and your effort and anything that goes into making the world a better place to be,” Draiman said.

“A lot of it revolves around the money, the financial end, but it’s more than that.

Tzedaka is translated best as ‘righteous giving’ or ‘giving rightly.’” Draiman’s work has brought him into contact with people he labels “heroes” – ordinary individuals who help the people around them in an extraordinary way.

“If someone calls me up on the phone and says, ‘I’ve got this really great place I want you to hear about,’ I’ll listen.

But if you call me up and say, ’I want you to meet this incredible person,’ my ears really prick up,” he said.

Some of Draiman’s favorite heroes include Bracha Kapach, the wife of a Jerusalem rabbi who feeds more than 1,100 poor people every week and more than 20,000 at Pessah; the “chicken lady,” who provided a fresh chicken every week for several hundred poor families even when she was well into her 90s; and Avshalom Beni, who uses dogs and cats to provide therapy for Holocaust survivors and children with behavioral problems.

When Draiman introduces philanthropists like the Gallatins to these unsung heroes, lives can be changed on all sides.

One recent afternoon, the Gallatins arrived at Crossroads, a cause they have supported for several years, for their first meeting with its new director, Robbie Sassoon.

A skeptical Ron Gallatin grilled Sassoon about the center’s projects and finances with a ferocity that would not have been out of place in a Manhattan boardroom.

“We treat making the decision of how our donors’ money is spent as the highest level of fiduciary responsibility,” Ron Gallatin said. “Our donors give to HOT [Hands On Tzedakah] because they trust us to have meetings like this one and know that we are making sure that every one of their dollars goes directly to help someone in profound need. Our donors know that HOT has no expenses and that we do not permit our partners to charge any administrative charges on any project we support.

The donor is truly seeing his whole dollar helping the people he wants helped.”

After a half hour, the former Wall Street guru sat back, pronounced himself satisfied and proceeded to write out a check that was much larger than the one he had planned. Then they were off to their fourth meeting of the day, in a five-day trip that contained no tourist visits at all.

“This is not depressing,” Meryl Gallatin said. “It’s the feelgood of making a difference.

It’s being able to go back after seeing a success story.”

None of it, the Gallatins said, could be achieved with confidence without having someone like Draiman to advise them.

“Arnie comes with us on many of our site visits and interprets far more than the language. He helps us understand cultural nuances that can only be understood by someone living in Israel,” Meryl Gallatin said. “You cannot have absentee management.

We hold all of our Israeli partners to a very high standard of accountability and use Arnie to monitor them when we aren’t here.

What we are trying to do doesn’t work without someone like him on the ground.”

“I’m in their face, much more than if they filled out a form once a year,” Draiman agreed.

I'll say three things:

1. These tours should be run for rich and middle class Israelis, so they can see how shamefully their government treats the poor, and so they can donate to help alleviate the pain and suffering this neglect causes.

2. American Jews should take the same tour – but in America. See how the poor and sick suffer, and see what Federations do – and do not do – to aid them. And then they can donate to organizations that actually do good. The poor of our own communities, towns and cities comes first. That's the halakha. And Israel has more than enough money to help its own.

3. That said, what the Gallitains and others are doing is far better than what the Federations are doing, and the Federations could learn much from from them.

Comments

[arnie draiman]

thanks for posting! i do run these tzedakah adventures for anyone and everyone including israelis (though mostly for visitors from overseas....).

arnie draiman
www.draimanconsulting.com

[Yochanan Lavie]

Apologies to Irving Berlin:

Have you seen the well-to-do
Coming from 13th Avenue
Interested in Israel's welfare
Flying in on first class air

Black hats and egg challahs
White shirts and lots of dollars
Spending every dime
For tzedekah time

Now, if you're Jewish
And you don't know what's newish
Why don't you go where poverty sits
Puttin' off the Ritz

Different types who wear a black coat
Tallit stripes and don't you dare gloat
Or throw a fit
Puttin' off the Ritz

Dressed up like a million dollar liability
Trying hard to look like Polish nobility
Super-sillity

Come, let's mix where Federations
Ignore such abominations
In their chits
Puttin' off the Ritz

Wear a hat just like you're in yeshiva
Or sheitel so they will believe ya
You deceiver!

You'll declare it's simply boorish
To be such a Slumdog tourist
It's the pits
Puttin' off the Ritz

[danny]

"Ronald L. Gallatin is a retired attorney, a CPA and a former managing director at Lehman Brothers credited with creating some of Wall Street’s most ingenious investment instruments."

Translation: Ronald L. Gallatin is one of the major players in our current economic shit-storm, who managed to exit with a nice bundle whilst avoiding prison (so far).

[danny]

YL... you are having an end of the year hot streak!

My recent favorite: "To live in this town you must be FRUM FRUM FRUM FRUM FRUM" (from "Shattered")

[Yochanan Lavie]

Thanks, Danny.

[Mr. Apikoros]

Nothing like guilt by association and guilt without proof, eh, Danny the Red?

[danny]

Three main sets of words:

1) "Lehman Bros"
2) "managing director"
3) "credited with creating some of Wall Street’s most ingenious investment instruments"

In order to assume this cat is clean, I'd have to wrap my mind into a mobius strip of bullshit.

There is a great novel, "Lush Life" by Richard Price, featuring a character called Danny the Red. Great character. Thanks.

[danny]

I just read up on the original Danny The Red from the 68 Paris riots. Never heard of him previously. Very cool. (I don't have red hair but I do have red in my beard).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Cohn-Bendit

[Dr Harold Goldmeier]

The Gallitains, their co-donors, Draiman, et al., are wonderful people for providing cash to the poor and calling attention their plight. However, there is no reason to infer that U.S. charitable social welfare (Jewish) agencies do much less good the Chicago Jewish Federation not only raises more money for the poor from a smaller pop than United Way & most other charities, but takes its participants on tours as well as to communities It supports. Having been a leader of the first ever Orthodox Jewish mission for CJF and having gone on numerous other missions, I can tell you we witnessed first hand the great work of CJF, which, by the way, takes only a very small amount off for overhead. Contributing to other charities is also a wonderful and important thing to do for the recipients and for the givers!

[Shmarya]

Posted by: Dr Harold Goldmeier | December 27, 2010 at 02:26 PM

Does the CJF support any homeless shelters in Chicago?

How about job training programs?

[Whythe Socks]

Shmarya,

Although I agree with your point about the imperative moral obligation to help your own first, you seem to make a big to do about some Halacha you know about that requires that we give to locals before we give to others. You seem to have forgotten that Halacha (for what it's worth) gives equal weight to local tzedaka as to tzedaka for the poor in the Holy Land.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

[Shmarya]

You seem to have forgotten that Halacha (for what it's worth) gives equal weight to local tzedaka as to tzedaka for the poor in the Holy Land.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by: Whythe Socks | December 27, 2010 at 09:20 PM

You don't know your halakha very well.

Your own poor first. The Poor of Israel second – and that's a minority opinion, I think. Most hold your own poor, your city's poor, your country's poor, the poor of Israel.