Chanan Kaufman was in good company back then. His fellow trailblazers at Aish HaTorah included some of the biggest names in outreach today — twin brothers Ephraim and Refael Shore Eric and Nechemia Coopersmith Ken Spiro — a few of the people who helped build the Aish empire up to what it is today.

Rabbi Kaufman’s first project was with a group of nonreligious college kids from Rio de Janeiro. A very inspired energetic friend who had married a Brazilian girl suggested they work on bringing a group of college students for a yeshivah experience in Israel. This was a radical idea back in 1983 when standard kiruv meant picking people off the Wall one soul at a time.

“The idea was intriguing but I asked him ‘If we’re going to do this why start with a group from Rio the most decadent city in the world?’ ” Kaufman remembers. “But Rav Noach was adamant and we did it. We got the funding and they came. And in the end many students were turned on to Judaism.”

Once the concept of bringing groups of secular college students to Israel proved viable a team including Kaufman and other Aish veterans got together to fine-tune the idea. They knew that in order to attract groups of intellectual college students they’d have to be professional and create a program that would be prestigious with the feel that it was designed for future leaders.

That’s how the Jerusalem Fellowships a program designed to bring secular college students to Israel for a combination tour and yeshivah learning began in 1985. “We had 80 students on our first trip ” shares Rabbi Kaufman. “More than half of them became frum and you’ve probably heard of them — Lori Palatnik [founder of the Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project which has brought over 10 000 wives and mothers to Israel] was in that first group.”

Politics and Religion Mix Rabbi Kaufman remained at Aish in Jerusalem for five years, where he married and had his first child. He earned his semichah from the yeshivah in 1985, and the following year moved back to the US to become founder and executive director of Aish New York. At the time, there was little organized kiruv presence in the biggest Jewish metropolis in the world. Aish had already opened its first branch in St. Louis, run by Rabbi Chaim Willis (whose sister Ellen made the family famous with a mass-circulated article about her baal teshuvah brother “Michael” in Rolling Stone magazine). There was also a branch in Los Angeles, run by Rabbi Nachum Braverman and Irwin Katzoff.

“I was doing mostly fundraising and overseeing the development of the organization,” says Rabbi Kaufman. “We had lots of learning programs and classes. The most popular were the dating and marriage seminars. A lot of singles were attracted to that.” Aside from the ever-present stress involved in the fundraising, the organization was running smoothly, yet Rabbi Kaufman missed the hands-on kiruv. And so, after seven years building up Aish New York, he handed it over to Aish alumnus and legendary fundraiser Rabbi Yitz Greenman, while he went back to the Jerusalem Fellowships he’d helped create — which was by that time, he says, “dead in the water.” With his characteristic innovative style, he was out to reclaim the project.

“The motivating thought was, ‘What would it take to get someone like us to come to a place like Aish without simply stumbling on it backpacking through Jerusalem?’ So we came up with the idea of creating a program about Jewish identity with geopolitics thrown into the mix,” Rabbi Kaufman relates. That meant that not only would the fellowships give students a chance to tour Israel and learn something about their heritage, but they’d also have a chance to hobnob with famous political personalities.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York’s senior senator at the time, was a true and dedicated friend of Israel and the Jewish People. He heard about the mission and agreed to get involved. “He became honorary chairman of the Jerusalem Fellowships, and his good friend, Israeli president Chaim Herzog, also agreed to lend his name to the organization,” says Kaufman.

Senator Moynihan sent out personal letters to Israeli politicians requesting they meet with students. Prime ministers Netanyahu, Peres, Rabin, and Sharon all met with Fellowship students. “They couldn’t refuse,” explains Kaufman, “because this non-Jewish senator from New York said ‘This is my organization, I want you to meet with them.’ ”

Money for Results

Thousands of young people had already come to Israel on the Jerusalem Fellowships, when Reb Zev Wolfson z”l, the biggest kiruv benefactor in the world and the one person who had raised more money for Israel than anyone else, sat down with a proposal for Rav Noach. Wolfson had a two-pronged idea that involved both campus kiruv and Israel trips, and was offering his contribution of $1 million for such a program. Rav Noach himself had ideas about how to use the funds, but this was totally Chanan Kaufman’s line, so he went straight to the phone and called his talmid.

“Chanan, I just raised you a million dollars,” he said.

“Rebbi, you have my attention,” Rabbi Kaufman immediately answered.

But Wolfson had ideas different from those of the usual nonreligious donors Rabbi Kaufman was accustomed to dealing with.

“I would tell these donors that we need to support Israel and that we need to stop intermarriage and that was good enough for them. Reb Zev actually wanted the students to become shomer Shabbos,” Kaufman recalls about the philanthropist who always thought big and often complained that there not enough high-impact projects around for the money he wanted to donate. “Well, you don’t just sprinkle salt on a cucumber and it instantly becomes a pickle. The Fellowships are front-line kiruv but the results aren’t instant. We’re just an introduction for many students, and these things take time. On the other hand, there was a million dollars that Wolfson was only guaranteeing to donate if the program produced his results, so we were forced to come up with a new angle. We created sort of a Fellowships follow-up, recruiting directly for the Aish beginners mechinah programs of ‘Essentials’ and ‘Jewel,’ expanding those programs dramatically as we offered scholarships to come back to Jerusalem and learn Torah.”

During that time, another thing happened on university campuses. Once Soviet Jewry was no longer an issue, Jewish campus activism all but died. Conversely, Palestinian activism — bolstered by a seemingly endless source of funds — was alive and flourishing, and with the insurgency of the Second Intifada, Jewish students found themselves without resources and defenseless. Now Wolfson’s assistance was crucial, and he helped put Jewish kiruv personnel on campus and backed Kaufman’s creation of still another program — Israel advocacy tours for Jewish students.

Between Kaufman’s original programs and Birthright overflow, which he officially managed to tap into, the next few years saw the Fellowships and its affiliates sending thousands more young adults to Israel. Momentum was good. But then the recession of 2008 hit — a major worldwide economic downturn, said to be the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

“We were nailed,” Rabbi Kaufman says. “Most of our backers had no choice — they gave their apologies and walked away.” The Fellowships program was left with an enormous debt of $1.5 million. Rabbi Kaufman was faced with the choice of somehow raising the funds in this new, hostile financial environment, or declaring bankruptcy.

“We were the stars of frontal kiruv and fundraising and had a presence on campus. We were the leaders in the ‘transformational Israel trip’ that changed people’s lives. Now we were broke, holding the bag for a huge debt. But how could we dismantle what we’d spent years building?”

Shifted Gears

Kaufman was determined not to declare bankruptcy, and instead had a brainstorm — a way he and his people could continue doing the same things, with the same infrastructure, knowledge, and team on the ground: to create a for-profit travel company that would harness all those advantages that were already set in place. That was the inspiration for GoInspire, a full-service, for-profit tour company that would also provide opportunities to explore Jewish identity.

“It was basically a continuation of what we had been doing for the past 20 years, only now we were making a profit instead of going into debt,” Rabbi Kaufman explains. “All the kiruv organizations we had created and partnered with now became our clients. We would customize trips for them, as well as take on new clients who wanted bar mitzvah trips and other non-kiruv itineraries.”

It took five years for Rabbi Kaufman to clean up the debt, yet he maintains that he is grateful for that difficult period. “Our financial disaster spurred me on to make one of the smartest career moves of my life. I knew I never wanted to be in debt again. In the past I had overextended myself, but it had never been this bad. The debt stopped me in my tracks.”

A defining moment, Rabbi Kaufman shares, is when he realized that a paradigm shift had occurred. The same people that worked for him previously when he was nonprofit were now working for him as a for-profit. They were doing the same thing, yet they’d become more professional, more focused on the bottom line.

“It didn’t take away any of the idealism, yet on their own they started asking how they could become more professional,” Rabbi Kaufman notes. “We held meetings and began to work on our databases to accumulate more clients. We worked on enhancing our website and marketing. Everybody became more proactive in figuring out how to do their jobs better.”

Perhaps the most life-altering change for Rabbi Kaufman himself was his reduced stress rate. He was no longer responsible for coming up with the payroll every month as he had been for the past 25 years. “It took my kishkes out. Creating independent cash flow freed me up to spend my newfound time being more innovative. And face it, you can’t be creative if you’re chasing the payroll all the time,” Rabbi Kaufman says, “which is the state of most nonprofits today. Who has time, for example, to think of better educational systems if there’s no money to pay the teachers?”

With the infrastructure in place, Rabbi Kaufman began branching out into other “niche” Israel trips, creating Bizrael — a program aimed at bringing business students to Israel to see firsthand the inside story of this “start-up nation,” and Israel Hi-Tech Ventures — where people on the cutting edge of Israeli high tech meet their American counterparts and potential investors.

Tools for a New Generation 

Once Rabbi Kaufman saw he had a sustainable model that didn’t sacrifice the ideological angle, he created his most innovative program to date: it’s called NextDor (dor is Hebrew for “generation”), and is designed to help Klal Yisrael navigate the fundraising world of the 21st century while keeping nonprofits self-sustaining — and innovative. The program, he says, was inspired by one of his Hi-Tech Ventures groups, when he found himself sitting in a room with venture funders, young entrepreneurs seeking those investments, and mentors and experts willing to assist. “I thought, wow, if these three groups work together, they can really accomplish something,” says Rabbi Kaufman. “My next thought was, we should be doing this for Torah!”

Rabbi Kaufman’s current vision is to completely change the way nonprofits are run, and says he’s not afraid of the burden. “The more responsible you are, the more wisdom and vision the Almighty will give you,” he says. He believes that through entrepreneur, funder, and mentor collaboration, the entrepreneur bringing creativity and drive and the older organizations bringing infrastructure, nonprofits can operate like profitable businesses and be highly successful.

“Our community is blessed with a tremendously high level of social activism. Countless individuals and organizations dedicate their very existence to education, social services, health, and numerous other efforts that build and improve Jewish life. But unfortunately, most are doing so with one hand tied behind their backs,” Rabbi Kaufman says. “The most idealistic chesed and Torah organizations should start thinking like a business and work with business acumen — it’s no longer counterintuitive.”

NextDor, Rabbi Kaufman explains, provides a forum for ongoing mentoring and training so the idealistic individual can learn to create a sustainable nonprofit.

Of course there are differences between running a business solely for profit and a chesed organization. Somewhere along the way there is going to have to be fundraising, but that, says Rabbi Kaufman, shouldn’t be a deterrent. “The Almighty will help you. And don’t set limits for yourself either — don’t be afraid to shake bigger. I was once going ask someone for $18,000, but before I approached the gvir, I called another Aish fundraiser for advice. He said ‘Why are you asking for only $18,000? Ask for more.’ So I went in and asked for $50,000, and you know what? I got it. The lesson? We all limit ourselves, so don’t limit yourself and don’t give up.

“There was a point years ago in the pre-Internet era when I was stuck and didn’t know who to turn to for donations,” Rabbi Kaufman continues. “So I called Rabbi Kalman Packouz, head of Aish Florida. He told me he sent out parshah sheets to a thousand businessmen weekly, people he had never met. He told me he would introduce me to a few. He was able to get an appointment easily —‘Oh, sure, you’re the one who sends out that wonderful weekly Shabbat Shalom fax’ — and best of all, when we arrived, they donated money.”

After that, Rabbi Kaufman got to work. He acquired the Cranes list and fax numbers of CEOs and top partners and although half of them immediately called to remove their names from the list, the other half didn’t. Six months later, he called them. “It wasn’t a cold call. They knew who I was and one out of five told me to come on over. I’ve raised millions of dollars over the years through that fax.”

“One day,” Rabbi Kaufman recalls, “I picked up the phone and the woman on the other end, with an obvious deep Irish accent, says, ‘Hi, Rabbi Kaufman, I’m Seymour Cohen’s personal assistant. We love your weekly fax and Mr. Cohen wants to offer a donation. But before you meet, do you have a brokerage account? He’d like to contribute stock.’ Before I even met with him, he contributed stock worth $36,000.” He still sends out the parshah fax for those who appreciate a hard copy they can actually hold in their hand, even as we’ve moved into the Internet age — and says he still receives sizable donations through that venue.

Rabbi Kaufman has been raising funds for kiruv for over 30 years, but he admits that funders for start-up kiruv, learning, and chesed organizations are lacking. “The good news is that we are seeing young people who are interested in becoming involved in the Jewish community and have dedication and creative ideas. Still, every funder wants a safe investment, like they do with their stock portfolio — IBM and Microsoft. They’ll give to the UJA because it’s been around a long time. But I believe they’re missing an important chance to make a significant difference to Torah Jewry. A new organization doesn’t have debt and overhead. The young leaders and their organization can stay in business for 50 years and with the funder’s backing, who knows how much it can accomplish?”

Rabbi Kaufman’s goal and vision over the next ten years is to see idealistic people out of yeshivos and kollelim working on initiatives that address vital issues for the Jewish People. “This generation is unique,” he says, echoing the thoughts of his rebbi and mentor, Rav Noach, who advocated a mass movement of leadership and taking of responsibility. But, says Rabbi Kaufman, in the 21st  century, passion and desire for change are no longer enough.

“Today we don’t just take a good Jew with lots of ideology and dump him out there to fend for himself. He needs to be given training and connections with funders, mentors, and social entrepreneurs in a collaborative environment, in order to become not just a leader, but an empowered leader.

“Those who seek leadership roles today need practical training and tools to found and run organizations, because in today’s world, passion and vision are no longer sufficient,” Rabbi Kaufman continues. “You need to be updated on the concepts of branding, building teams, communication, marketing, and the impact of media. Although we’re living in an age of challenges, we’re also living in an age of opportunities, and by taking advantage of these opportunities, we do what we can to keep our mission as the Jewish People not just alive, but thriving.”  —

Keep Dreaming

Seated in the conference room at 3 West Club in Manhattan are Orthodox men and women representing various organizations, some of which seem to have existed forever and others not even off the ground yet. Satmar Bikur Cholim is one of the better known, but as the Jewish population grows, and with it the growing needs for financial assistance, they’re one of several in this room seeking ways to continue practicing the chesed they’re famous for in an ever-demanding financial environment.

Other attendees are here with new ideas but require help actualizing them. One participant has come to this one-day seminar to network and learn strategies for helping young men in his community who want to enter the workforce by reaching out to potential employers and educational services. Two Ohel administrators are also there. “We came here looking for out-of-the-box ideas. One speaker talked about a fundraiser called ‘Going Over the Edge,’ where people get sponsors who pledge money for each time they rappel over the cliff. It’s fun and makes money for a worthy cause. We’ve also gotten some fresh ideas for networking.”

There’s one goal common to all of them, though — to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to build financially sustainable nonprofits and launch successful community initiatives.

“Dreams and visions are vital,” shares Estie Rand, co-founder of NextDor and founder of Strand Consulting. “But without goals, they will remain only that. Goals are real and time-based, concrete, measurable. And to reach those goals, you need to answer when, where, who, how long will it take, and how will I know I’ve gotten there. For example, someone might say, ‘My goal for this year is to run three specific programs and have X number of people funding them giving Y amount of money each.’ But what’s your strategy, the set of plans to reach your goals? What do you need in terms of manpower and energy? Sometimes, once you start to break it down, you might see that the goal is not as realistic as you thought, so you have to go back and modify the goal to make it realistic.”

Rabbi Kaufman has brought in three Jewish but secular CEOs of well-known companies to talk to the attendees. Zev Brenner from radio broadcast Torah Anytime interviews them in front of the group. “It was an interesting experience,” shares Rabbi Kaufman, “because I got to do some kiruv right there on the spot. The speakers were intrigued about Torah Anytime, and so in front of the group I pressed a button on my cell and up came Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein preceding his Torah lecture with a joke. The concept of a Torah phone lecture was amazing to them. And they appreciated the joke, too.”

—Rachel Ginsberg contributed to this report

(Excerpted from Mishpacha Issue 653)