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Friday August 2, 1996

JCF to laud 25-year givers `We Jews have to stick together and help each other'

TERESA STRASSER
Bulletin Staff

The Menlo Park resident has since raised two sons, lost one husband in an automobile accident, separated from another, run an interior design business and put herself through school to become a stockbroker. Through it all, she never missed sending a check to the JCF every year.

After 66 annual donations, she is one of JCF's longest-term givers.

It is this kind of consistency the Jewish organization is rewarding with a thank-you dinner Tuesday, Sept. 3 at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. All 2,500 individuals invited to the affair -- featuring an appearance by Joel Grey -- have pledged annual donations to JCF for 25 years or more.

The amount pledged isn't the issue.

Underwritten by private grants, the dinner launches a larger program called the Quarter Century Circle, which will formally recognize long-term campaign donors with events throughout the year.

Like many who will be honored, Wilfred Kay was once a recipient of federation services.

Kay spent World War II in a Russian orphanage, from which she was sent to work in a local factory each day. After the war, he learned that his parents, three brothers and three sisters were all dead, buried in a mass grave near his hometown of Pultusk, Poland.

After almost four years in a displaced persons camp in Germany, Kay immigrated to Oakland, arriving uneducated and with no family members to help him adjust to a new life.

America "was a strange country," remembers Kay, now 68 and living in San Rafael. "If you don't know the language, you feel lost. It was encouraging to be met at the train station [by JCF volunteers]. They took us to our temporary homes, supplied us with pocket money for the essentials and tried to find us jobs."

After serving in the Korean War, Kay was eligible for the GI Bill, finally achieving his goal of attending college. He was eventually hired by Pacific Gas and Electric, where he worked for 30 years.

"That was when I began donating. I was a reluctant recipient, like most. We weren't proud. But most of us found jobs quickly and became independent. The best feeling is when you can give, rather than receive," says Kay.

Thirty years ago, he gave $5. Every year since then, he has given as much as his income would allow.

"It wasn't much. But it's a good feeling to share. We Jews have to stick together and help each other here, and especially in the state of Israel," Kay says.

Last year, JCF raised $19.04 million in pledges for Jews in need locally as well as in Israel and elsewhere overseas.

While searching for 25-year donors, JCF found about 300 local Jews who have given for 50 years or more, according to project co-chairs Golda Kaufman and Robert Sinton.

At 97, Al Spencer is one of the oldest living donors.

The Hungarian-born San Francisco resident has complemented years of volunteer work at the Jewish Home for the Aged with annual donations to federation that began in 1934, when his daughter was born.

"As a Jew, I have always felt it was my duty to give, just as it is my duty to do volunteer work," Spencer says.

For retired Palo Alto schoolteacher Marilyn Goldfarb, 68, it was the founding of the state of Israel that called her to action.

She gave $25 in 1950 -- "a lot of money in those days" -- and volunteered for the annual fund-raising drive.

That donation may have helped the fledgling Jewish state, but it had a much more significant impact on Goldfarb's love life.

That year's campaign director was Eli Goldfarb. "I married the boss," she said joking; the Goldfarbs have been both volunteers and donors ever since.

While the idea of the program is to honor those who give regularly rather than just those JCF calls "major donors," one large-scale philanthropist will be honored at the dinner. Richard Goldman doesn't like to talk about the size of his gifts but will admit he is "committed to federated giving." The owner of Goldman Insurance in San Francisco and former JCF president will be presented with a book, produced by U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library, about his impact on the local Jewish community.

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