If you needed one sentence to sum up this week’s column
printed in The Jerusalem Post it is,
Diaspora generosity is heroic, but too many of the institutions that
collect our money have lost the plot, padding paychecks, upgrading seats, and
hoarding cash, while Israelis in genuine need wait.
Four years ago, sitting at my Makor Rishon desk
with a stack of Form 990s, I stumbled on a line that made me almost fall off of
my chair, The CEO of the
Friends of the Israel Defense Forces was taking home more than US$1 million a
year – more than the charity gave, annually, to the widows and orphans of IDF
soldiers.
That discovery became my 2021 exposé on the FIDF’s decision
to cut every shekel of its grant to the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization. I
wrote then that something in the culture felt “toxic.” It turns out, the smell
only got stronger.
Fast-forward to July 2025. An 18-page internal probe, leaked
to Ynet and later obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, accuses FIDF board
chair Morey Levovitz of running the charity like a personal fiefdom - steering
contracts to friends, sidelining professional staff, and racking up roughly US$53,000
in luxury-travel reimbursements that may violate the group’s own rules. The San
Francisco chapter, one of the FIDF’s most generous donor pools, has frozen
contributions in protest.
This is not okay, because donors thought their gifts were
racing to the front lines. Instead, almost half of last year’s US$280 million
windfall, raised after Hamas’s October 07 massacre, never left the FIDF’s bank
account. Consultant Arnie Draiman called it “a hurricane outside and a
rainy-day fund inside.” Meanwhile, grassroots groups crowd-funded basic helmets
for reservists.
The FIDF’s response will one day be taught as textbook
crisis public relations, hire a white-shoe law firm, bring in a communications
agency, and promise to “reinforce policies.” Necessary steps, yes, but donors
are asking a more straightforward question, Why should a charity dedicated to
soldiers need an 18-month compliance overhaul before buying soldiers what they
actually ask for?
The FIDF is hardly alone. In January 2024, the American
Society for Yad Vashem, for decades the Holocaust museum’s primary US
fundraiser, quietly posted a banner on its homepage, “Effective January 01,
2024, the ASYV is no longer affiliated with Yad Vashem.” The split followed a
bitter battle over an US$80 million endowment that the ASYV’s board says Yad
Vashem chairman Dani Dayan tried to “raid.”
Here, too, an institution that marketed itself as a “friend”
of Jerusalem seemed to forget that being a friend does not confer ownership.
The pattern repeats across the alphabet soup of communal nonprofits,
comfortable New York or Los Angeles boards grow distant, local staff shrink
into compliance, and Israeli partners, who once begged for dollars, discover
they can raise money online themselves.
Part of the blame lies with the donors. They confuse size
with impact, galas with governance. They love a red-carpet photo of Ashton
Kutcher bidding US$200,000 for a lone-soldier scholarship, but they rarely read
the fine print that explains where the administration fee ends and the
scholarship begins.
Part of it is structural. “Friends-of” charities were born
when Israeli institutions lacked the sophistication or the credit-card
processing to fundraise abroad. Today, any hospital, museum, or start-up can
open a Stripe account in minutes. The middlemen stay relevant by cultivating
exclusivity - Donate through us; we alone speak for the cause. That arrangement
works until the cause decides to speak for itself.
And part of it is crisis fatigue. Since October 07,
donations to Israeli causes have surged, but so have urgent appeals - helmets,
tourniquets, post-trauma therapy, evacuee housing, northern-front shelters.
When everyone is shouting “emergency,” legacy organizations feel pressure to
wave equally dramatic banners, maybe before doing the boring back-office work
of reprioritizing budgets.
To be fair, the FIDF’s audited statements show a lean
fundraising machine, it spends about seven cents to raise a dollar, and roughly
80% of outlays land in program buckets rather than overhead. Still, executive
pay remains eye-popping - CEO Steven Weil took home US$667,000 in 2022, while
the top 14 staffers shared US$4 million. Salaries are not sins, but they demand
proportionate results and humility.
On the other side of the ledger, the ASYV supplied up to 30%
of Yad Vashem’s annual budget before relations soured. Losing that stream
mid-war is not just a governance soap opera; it is a strategic risk to Israel’s
flagship Holocaust-education center, precisely when antisemitism is spiking.
Numbers, though, are sterile. Let me bring you back to the
widows’ office in Tel Aviv in 2021. A wall of photographs, smiling young
soldiers, black ribbons at the corner, reminded me why NGOs exist. The director
told me the FIDF cut meant canceling summer retreats for children who had
already buried a parent. “They’ll understand,” she said, forcing a smile.
“Soldiers must come first.”
Soldiers, widows, orphans, evacuee kids, trauma therapists –
none of them care whether the money flows through a 501(c)(3) in New York or a
PayBox link in Beersheba. They care that it flows quickly, efficiently, and
with transparency.
Donors must do their homework. Ask for audited statements,
not press releases. If a nonprofit claims funds are “earmarked,” demand the
letter that proves it.
Legacy boards must invite fresh Israeli voices. Diaspora
expertise is invaluable, but lived Israeli reality keeps priorities honest.
Regulators should take note. US charity law already requires
conflict-of-interest policies, yet the FIDF probe suggests that those policies
often sit unread in binders.
Israeli beneficiaries must diversify their income. Counting
on a single American “friends” group is a vulnerability; just ask Yad Vashem.
Newer outfits publish real-time dashboards of donations and
deliveries. During the Israel-Hamas War, volunteer networks live streamed the
purchase of ceramic vests and the hand-off to frontline units. Transparency
built trust; trust unlocked more donations, which in turn fed the loop.
Legacy organizations can borrow those playbooks. Imagine the
FIDF sending push alerts: “Your US$180 bought 12 trauma kits delivered today to
Division 162.” Imagine the ASYV opening its endowment ledger so donors could
trace every dollar to a specific educational program at Yad Vashem.
Jewish philanthropy is, at heart, relational. We give
because we feel connected to soldiers guarding our borders, to survivors
guarding our memory, to evacuees guarding our common future. That relationship
is sacred. When nonprofit executives mistake our kindness for a blank check, they
break not just a business contract but a communal covenant.
We can forgive mistakes. We cannot forgive arrogance
masquerading as expertise, or first-class tickets labeled as “mission
critical.” If an organization calls itself “Friends of” anything – IDF, Yad
Vashem, Sheba Medical Center, take your pick – it should act like a friend -
honest, transparent, responsive, and, above all, accountable.
Four years after my first uneasy look behind the FIDF’s
curtain, I find myself saying something I never thought I would write: Maybe
the era of automatic trust is over, and that is a healthy thing. Sunlight is
good for soldiers and charities alike.
The next time a glossy invitation lands in your inbox
promising, “Your donation will change lives,” don’t be shy. Ask for the
receipts. Because in 2025, real friendship should come with full disclosure.
