AJCongress Suspends Activities
Read Jerome A. Chanes’ column about AJCongress’ impact here.
The American Jewish Congress has suspended its activities after running out of funds.
The suspension of the venerable Jewish-American advocacy organization’s activities, confirmed to JTA on Sunday by acting co-executive director Marc Stern, comes after months of rumors that the organization was on the verge of collapse after losing most of its endowment in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme.
As of Sunday afternoon there was no mention of the suspension on the AJCongress website.
The Jerusalem Post had reported in April that the AJCongress lost as much as 90 percent of its approximately $24 million endowment in the Madoff scam.
Richard Gordon, the AJCongress president, told the Post that the group has money in the bank but cannot access it now due to the constraints of its constitution.
The 92-year-old organization is rumored to be in merger talks with the American Jewish Committee.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
