Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program

I grew up in Montreal surrounded by community. I went to a day school through high school. During high school, my first job was at the Jewish Education Center after school twice a week, laminating posters for day schools and copying videos for distribution to schools. Camp Ramah (in Canada) was the most important Jewish experience.

But it was only when I won a communal award and received a free trip to the GA in NYC (1992) that I considered dedicating myself to this profession. I went to a session featuring all the graduate programs in Jewish communal leadership, completed a postcard (pre-online form) and mailed it to Brandeis and received a package from the Hornstein Program that was inspiring. About two weeks later, I received a call from Prof. Bernie Reisman inviting me to visit the Brandeis campus.

We refer to it as UX. What's the user experience? That to me was such a tremendous thing — to think of the head of the program calling me up to ask when I was coming to visit. I went to meet him. And I was sold!

In my first few weeks at Brandeis, I attended CJP's annual meeting and had the pleasure of hearing Rabbi Harold Kushner speaking about parents and children. In his keynote speech, he noted that kids do professionally today what their parents do as hobbies. For me that was true — in a large sense, community was my father's hobby and there I was embarking on this new professional journey. It all suddenly made sense to me.

Absolutely true. When I stumbled into this field and realized how much of a match it was for me, it gave my parents huge pride that I was treating this work they did as a profession. I feel very grateful to them that they understood me and knew it would be a good fit. They knew this field well and they understood that this was the right direction for me.

Correct. I use that example from Rabbi Kushner which I still love. While maybe hobby is not the right word for community involvement, it explains how far we've gone to professionalize the work.

There is a story my father used to tell me about the time when he was very active in Federation in Montreal and he came home on a Tuesday night or a Wednesday night. I must've been a little kid around four or five or six years old, and he came home for dinner. And I went up to the door and I gave him a big hug and said “Shabbat Shalom!” and he said, “What do you mean, ‘Shabbat Shalom'?” “Well, you're home for dinner, so it must be Shabbat!” I said.

Those days my father had lots of work and lots of meetings. By day he was a lawyer professionally and in the evenings he was at Federation.

No, because one thing that we had were weekends. We would go to Vermont every weekend and ski. That was real family time so while I didn't see much of him during the week I had him fully on the weekends. That was before laptops and before iPhones and even before Blackberries believe it or not! Once in awhile he may have brought a file home, but otherwise I really had him to myself then and have no recollection of him not being present.

By the time I was 9 or 10 years old he was already phasing out of Federation. He had been president of Federation and so by the time I was 11, he was a past president and had much less community responsibility. So he phased out over time and the level of involvement diminished. When I was 13 my father was appointed as federal judge in Canada, and as a judge he actually had more time in his schedule. My memory of him was that he was actually very present in my life.

My mother was also involved but not quite to the same degree as my father. She was a part of what was called the Group of 35. They were a group of women in Canada which fought for the freedom of Soviet Jews. She was not as involved in things as my father was but frankly, I would say times were also different then. She played a very supportive role to my father. She was working but her job was definitely the secondary job. She was responsible for the family and the home.

I think in most marriages today it's different. I am 50% responsible for the home and my wife is 50% responsible. We each have our duties, but I play an equal role.

My dad used to tell a story about the days when he became a judge and he started being the one to go to the supermarket. One day he went to the supermarket in the middle of the day and he described himself as rounding each corner in trepidation worrying about who he might bump into. Afterall, he thought, what self-respecting professional male would be in the supermarket in the middle of the day? (This was in the early ‘80s.) The fact was that the cadence of the work was different as a judge and if he wasn't hearing cases he had more freedom in his schedule to go to the supermarket if necessary. Today, of course, there's no shame in going to the supermarket in the middle of the day!

My father passed away 6 years ago. His name was Irving Halperin. My mother's name is Grace. And I have a sister, Vivian. She is in Montreal working in the education sector.

My wife is originally from Montreal as well. Her name is Joanna and we just celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary. We have two children: Lilly, age 11; and Elisha, age 9.

I oversee marketing, board relations and jointly oversee development with another colleague.

[Laughs.] Full. We have a very large team in development in JDC where we're close to 100 staff in development internationally. The issues I deal with daily are both big and small. For example, on the marketing side of things, how do we present JDC as an innovative, modern organization when many people only know us through our history? In board relations, how do we bring in new trustees to the organization? How do we maintain the great leadership that we have and how do we find great people to inherit the organization?

Yes, currently we're at 164 board members. Indeed, it is unusual, and I'd say not a best practice. But what comes with it is a deeply, deeply engaged board who have prioritized JDC, and truly love the organization and what it does. That by itself is a pleasure. It's phenomenal to see the degree to which they want to be involved in helping the organization grow. When you have so many people who are strongly committed, it would not only be a challenge to pare it down, but it probably wouldn't be good for the organization.

We have about 1,000 employees worldwide, with more than 100 in our headquarters here in New York City, and hundreds more, mostly in our Jerusalem office, and in the former Soviet Union, Africa and Asia, and Latin America.

The original headquarters was located in downtown New York. In fact, we have a picture in our lobby of the original board with probably 25 people at the time. It was truly a who's-who of philanthropy in New York City, bringing together, in a way not often done before, the monied “Our Crowd” elites among the German Jewish population and the Jewish philanthropic and religious leaders among those originally from Eastern Europe. For our centennial campaign, we called it our Second Century Endowment Campaign, we went back to that original boardroom. Our key board members who were involved in the campaign sat around the same desk in the same room 100 years later and we took a photo. It's good to have those records of course.

Indeed. JDC has been involved in every major Jewish event over the last 104 years. Every one of these stories comes with a type of ingenuity that is just remarkable. For example, most people don't know that the JDC helped fund the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and had staff in Warsaw who were central to the planning. Our country director in Poland at that time was killed by the Nazis, refusing to leave his fellow Jews in the Ghetto. He refused to leave because he considered his job to be so important. He brought money in from the States and when that channel closed, he appealed to Polish Jewish families that had quite literally hidden wealth and got their support not just for programs that helped feed people, but also for arming the Ghetto fighters.

JDC's soup kitchen for the local Jews doubled as a meeting place because the Nazis wouldn't allow Jews to congregate en masse. So they created a soup kitchen which served as central planning for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Another beautiful story from the past is about a JDC orphanage in Russia in the 1920s. We have a photo of the staff from that orphanage in our archives and on that staff was an art teacher. Today it's quite normal in schools to have an art teacher but in the ‘20s that wasn't the norm. That art teacher eventually left the school and went on to work in Moscow in the arts scene and Yiddish theater and then ended up going to Paris and eventually JDC brought him to New York. I think it was the early '40s. That art teacher was Marc Chagall. He'd been a JDC employee at one point but then we ended up buying him transfer to the States and getting him out of Paris.

So there are those big stories that JDC was a part of, but for every big story there are tens of thousands of “small” stories with not-so-famous individuals who JDC has helped and worked with over these many decades. I just spoke to a woman today who just this week learned that the JDC played a role in her family's arrival in Montreal in 1956. I asked her if she'd seen our digital archives and she went in and found her family's papers. So you know there are thousands and thousands of stories like that.

What's remarkable here is that almost everything we do is innovative. There's nothing rote about our work. For example, our work in Israel today is focused on building new social service models. We are a social service incubator. In partnership with the government of Israel, we identify social problems in the country, whether they be impacting kids or the elderly or people with special needs or employment. Based on our research and past successes, we develop program models to help alleviate potential social and or economic problems and support a stronger Israel.

The most obvious example of this are employment issues among the Haredi community and the Arab population of Israel. In 20 years from now these groups will represent something like 40% of the workforce. If that 40% of the work force is underemployed or unemployed, that is going to be a major lag on Israel's economy into the future. So we aim to develop and institute programs that alleviate those problems over the course of the next 20 years and greatly minimize what could have been a much larger social and/or economic problem.

Consequently, people in the Haredi community have been through employment programs that we have developed. The result is increased numbers of Haredi with gainful employment, more money in families and the community to spend on living expenses and increased quality of life. The trajectory for this community, if all continues well, is continued positive development that will have a tremendous impact on the future.

Another example: In comparison to the United States, Israel has many people with disabilities who live in institutions. Together with the Israel Government and the Ruderman Family Foundation, JDC is studying this situation and began creating programs to get people out of institutional settings and into independent living situations where they can live comfortably and still get the services they need. There are a number of different set-ups which cater to people with disabilities that are effective and more efficient than the traditional institutional solution. At the end of the day, if we can improve the quality of life of people with disabilities and work for their inclusion in the wider community, we'll have a win-win situation.

I work very closely with our CEO, David Schizer. I work with the senior management team, with all of the senior professionals across the organization and with our board members. And I work closely with our team of people who go out and raise the money for JDC projects and programs.

When I got to Hornstein I thought I was going into community planning. By the time I left Hornstein I was all about fund-raising. As a boy I was often fund-raising. I sold chocolate bars when I was in elementary school. My only problem then was an inventory problem  —  I ate too much of the chocolate! One year I had a small part in the French play at school but couldn't remember my line, so the next year I joined the fund-raising committee, for which I was better suited! And in college, I made extra money working in the development office calling alumni and parents, and asking them for money to support the school. It's what I've always done and what I've always liked doing.

It depends on how you think about it. I don't ask for money for myself. I ask for money to help others who are in real need, and you can't shy away from that. There's something incredibly special about helping somebody understand the role they can play in helping others. Sometimes you take people down a path of understanding about philanthropy and you get to witness them as they realize that their philanthropy can provide them great reward and meaning. That's extremely powerful.

Many people don't fully understand the value of philanthropic dollars and how they can both change the world in profound ways and meet their own needs if they can find the right nonprofit and the right projects to invest in.

I frequently talk to people about their philanthropic portfolios. People commonly think in terms of financial portfolios, which is necessary, but there's more. In development and fund-raising, it's important to help donors figure out what's important to them and how they might express themselves philanthropically. For example, what's their number one priority? Is it their alma mater because their alma mater helped them become who they are? And what about the Jewish community? What about beyond the Jewish community? What about Israel? And how do they fit all of that into their philanthropic portfolio?

It's a fairly usual situation for somebody who is starting to think philanthropically to be in their mid-40s and have been working like crazy for 20 years to attain professional success. They're finally at the top or near the top and they're feeling comfortable where they are and not in jeopardy of losing their fortune. And suddenly they can start to think philanthropically. When you find someone who's entering this stage of their life, it's special because you now have a unique opportunity and privilege to help them see the world with new eyes and themselves in it.

People are what I love most about this work. I've worked with great colleagues and lay leaders over the years, people with whom I share my value system and beliefs. I have friendships going back to my first days in my first job that are still important to me while continuing to make new friends every day, both with professionals and lay leaders.

No, not really. I do like to write letters. I have a stack of my own stationery on my desk and I'll often write notes to people and send them out through the mail.

Not very much. I follow it and connect to a lot of people. And that helps of course. You get to see a lot of things going on in people's lives who are scattered around the world. It helps you stay in the loop with where people are and what they are up to. It's an opportunity to learn about new babies, weddings, jobs, the good things or the sad things, like funerals.

My least favorite part of my work is all the email and keeping up with it. Being an international organization, our email cycle is 24 hours a day. I wake up in the morning and have half a day's worth of emails from Israel waiting for me. And we have people as far away as Australia and Chile, and of course from here, so it's just constant email.

I got an MMHS, a Master of Management of Human Services degree. It was what they had before they had the MBA program.

I don't believe I applied to The Heller School initially. I remember we were trying to figure out how to make the schedules work so that I could do both Heller and Hornstein classes. The key, as it turned out, was placing out of Hebrew which freed me to take afternoon Heller classes.

Those business skills helped me tremendously. It's in part where the field is going. Today I would encourage people who are contemplating a graduate degree to get those business skills or get that law degree. What I learned about Jewish professional leadership was deeply valuable. There's much that's often counterintuitive in these professional relationships.

That's right. It's important. The field has changed so much. Today Jewish nonprofits are held to a high standard of financial rigor and much higher standards generally, much more than they were 25 years ago. Today you must have some basic accounting skills, know how to read a financial statement, and understand data and how to use it. I took a class with Heller Professor Andy Hahn on measures and evaluation, and you know today that's what we talk about. That data is key to how we are able to go about securing gifts. What are the outcomes of the program? How can we measure them? It's all so central to our work. So I agree that what's needed is really a mix of both skill sets.

Fund-raisers are very hard to find. It's a fund-raisers' market not a management market. But there are talented people out there. I've certainly hired a number of Hornsteiners! Elisheva Massel MA/MBA ’14 is probably the most recent.

Bernie Reisman was a mentor to me and set the standard for our class. He led by example, always living what he preached to us. I still walk into meetings and think about structuring the environment!

David Mersky has also been a mentor and become a friend. He taught me all the fundamentals of fund-raising and guided me through my career. I can't tell you how many times over the last 23 years he and I have managed to catch up over lunch or grab a drink together. He has offered me direction and inspiration at difficult moments and been the first to celebrate my accomplishments.

I often do, though last year I was out of town traveling. A few times I have hired people I met during Starr.

Indeed, embrace complexity and be decisive. Sometimes there's no perfect answer to a problem. Build enough support around what you think is right and keep it moving forward. The larger the organization, the more complex things seem to be.

I do recall an experience with a lovely older donor who had decided she wanted to sponsor the entire cost of bringing a group of people to Israel who had never been before. A perfect example of Murphy's Law: the only luggage that didn't show up was her luggage. We started the trip up north and then went to Tel Aviv and still no luggage. She had to purchase new clothes but one item, a girdle, eluded her. She asked me to help her find one. As a dedicated Federation employee and wanting to help this special woman, I went with her to the mall to search for a girdle. I can now tell you with absolute certainty: Girdles are not sold in Israel!