Conservatives Cut Funds for Campus Group
The Conservative movement has reduced funding for its college campus organization, and expects Koach supporters to come up with the remaining requested money, according to United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism’s executive vice president.
In its board meeting in Detroit on Sunday, USCJ voted to provide Koach with $100,000 for fiscal year 2013, beginning July 1, provided that the campus group’s supporters come up with an additional $130,000 by the end of December, Rabbi Steven Wernick told JTA. The board also will work to develop a three- to five-year business plan for the organization, Wernick said. He called the program, which serves some 25 campuses and 3,000 students, a “high-impact program with minimal participation.”
The United Synagogue outlay is enough to fund the campus group until the end of December, he said.
“If they don’t raise the funds by then, they don’t have the resources to be able to continue it,” Wernick said.
Reports last week that United Synagogue might cut funding altogether led to the creation of savekoach.org, a petition to rescue the campus group.
The Women’s League of Conservative Judaism came to Koach’s rescue earlier this year when it raised about $35,000 in a “last-minute” campaign to save February’s Koach kallah, its annual conference, The Jewish Standard reported.
“We have continued to raise funds,” Rhonda Jacobs Kahn, Women’s League communications director, told JTA.
Rabbi Ari Israel, the Hillel director at the University of Maryland at College Park, called the decision “a step in the right direction.”
“We need to have ideologically based interests for those kids looking for it,” he said.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
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 Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
