His cause is still relevant, but his fundraising is obsolete

Tzvi: We need to do things differently to stay relevant.

Nachum: The Va’ad needs leadership who will really stay committed.

Nachum

My in-tray was overflowing.

Just as I reached for the first letter, slitting it open carefully and placing the envelope to one side, the secretary knocked on the door, waving a sheaf of email print-outs.

“Thank you so much,” I told her, motioning to an empty spot on the desk.

The envelopes were mostly bills, a few official thank-you cards, the occasional and very welcome check. I smiled when I got to Jerry Grossman’s. He was a good friend of the Va’ad, he really was. Every Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah, and Pesach, he sent “a little something,” usually a pretty generous “little something,” to say the least. One of our most loyal donors, never mind he lived way out in the boondocks and we rarely spoke. He knew about our work, believed in our goals, and sent his quiet support three times a year.

I took out a clean sheet of stationery to compose a few words of thanks. It was part of the ritual: Jerry delivered, I responded. Although we’d long moved from handwritten letters to digital, I knew Jerry appreciated my personal words of thanks. He once told me he kept the thank-you letters in a special file.

“I need it to show the jury Up There,” he’d joked at the time.

He was well-meaning, Jerry, and over the years he’d become more religious, especially now that his son was living in Israel, doing the kollel thing. And he’d always been sympathetic to our cause, ever since we were a fledgling organization struggling to help a community in desperate need with barely the funds to pay our rent.

There was a polite tap on my office door, and then it swung open. I looked up, let my gaze sweep over the plush carpeting, gleaming wooden doors, high ceilings, and long hallways filled with purposeful bustle. Things have changed, boy, have they changed. Sometimes, I still pinched myself when I thought about the building that we owned, the building that housed some of the most incredible activism that our community has known.

“Reb Nachum, good morning, what’s the good word?” Shlomo Cowen strode into my office, pulling up a chair. Technically, I was his superior, I was the organization’s president, after all. But Shlomo was a financial genius, and the legal advisor who handled anything that needed a lawyer — court hearings, appeals, legal advice for community members in crisis... he was the brains behind so much of what we actually did to help Klal Yisrael.

“Reb Shlomo.” I nodded and smiled. “Baruch Hashem, things are good, and how is everything by you? The mishpachah?”

He waved away the niceties. “Yes, yes, baruch Hashem, it’s good, it’s good. Listen, we need to speak, you know the project we were discussing last week? Raising awareness of the schooling crisis, the convention, setting up funding for worldwide change, new yeshivos, a new system for acceptance...”

“Yes, of course.” We’d been talking ideas for a long time, this was something that the community needed help with, and finally things seemed to be getting off the ground. We’d need a fundraiser, of course, maybe a mailing campaign or one of those Chinese auctions, we did one a few years back and it seemed to go down well.