January-February 2012 - The Jewish Georgian

January-February 2012 THE JEWISH GEORGIAN Page 29
Jewish
THE
Georgian
Fidelity Bank partners with JNF as collection point for Blue Boxes
By Mordecai Zalman
In many of the homes and communities
in which we grew
up, that little Jewish
National Fund (JNF)
Blue Box, or pushke as it
was referred to with its
Yiddish descriptive
name, was ubiquitous.
From 1901 with the
founding of Karene
Kayemeth LeIsrael
(KKL), which, in this
country, goes under the
JNF banner, up until the
1948 founding of the State
of Israel, the Blue Box was
a symbol of our dream and a
vehicle to financially help in
acquiring land and making
improvements for the future.
From 1948 forward its purpose
changed from a way to
support a dream to a method
of taking part in making that
dream a reality.
According to the KKL website,
“Shortly after the founding of the
organization, Haim Kleinman, a bank clerk
from Nadvorna, Galicia, placed a box in
his office and sent off a letter to Die Welt,
By Ron Feinberg
The world was exploding around
George Stern when his father picked him up
and carried him down to the basement of
their apartment complex. He was a child,
only three years old, and the German war
machine was on the march.
It was 1940. The Nazis were rolling
into Belgium, bombing Brussels, where he
and his family lived, chewing up the countryside
and destroying anyone and anything
that stood in the path of the Third Reich and
its efforts to take control of Europe.
“I remember the noise, the explosions
and my father picking me up,” Stern says.
He also remembers what happened a few
hours later, still early in the morning, when
he heard someone knocking at the door.
“It was the milkman,” Stern says, a
note of amazement still echoing in his voice
when he recently recalled his very up-close
the Zionist newspaper in Vienna,” in
which he notified the paper as follows:
“In keeping
with the saying,
‘bit and bitty fill
the kitty’ and following
the
Congress resolution
on KKL’s
founding, I put
together an
‘Erez Israel
box’, stuck the
w o r d s
‘National
Fund’ on it and
placed it in a
prominent
spot in my
office. The
results, given
the extent of
the experiment
so far,
have been
astonishing.
I suggest that likeminded
people, and particularly all
Zionist officials, collect contributions
to KKL in this way.”
A recurring challenge that has faced
JNF is how to make it convenient for its
The pushke lives
George Stern
and personal introduction to World War II.
Years later he asked his parents why the
worker was willing to risk his life to deliver
milk.
“He was making a statement,” his
mother told him, that even in war “life goes
supporters to deliver the change that is collected
in these Blue Boxes to the offices of
the organization. Now, the JNF Atlanta
office has found an exciting and innovative
new way to collect these coins. Under the
enthusiastic leadership of board member
Bruce Reisman, a unique arrangement has
been made with Atlanta’s Fidelity Bank,
Member FDIC, to serve as a deposit destination
to have these monies placed in
JNF’s checking account.
H. Palmer Procter, Jr., Fidelity Bank
president, and Bruce Reisman, JNF
board member
As an accommodation and one of its
services to the general public, Fidelity
Bank offers coin-counting machines in
See BLUE BOXES, page 31
Holocaust survivor’s story filled with drama, hope
on.”
Stern will be sharing his life’s story at
this year’s Yom HaShoah Service of
Remembrance, April 22 at Greenwood
Cemetery – the early years in Belgium with
his family, the rise of Hitler and the Nazis,
the family’s detention as “enemy aliens” at
a camp in France, and their harrowing journey
through Spain and Portugal, then on to
Cuba and Freedom in the United States.
It’s a story laced with danger, fear and
joy, rescue and survival. A tale that will also
include the difficult and dangerous work of
righteous gentiles and other heroes of the
Holocaust.
It’s been nearly seven decades since
the monstrous work of the Nazis was fully
revealed to the World. Today, the bleak
days of World War II are a fading memory
See SURVIVOR, page 31
A new director, a
continued direction
By: Marvin Botnick
Gail Luxenberg
To be a good cook, turn out memorable
creations, and produce a meaningful
experience, a person needs the correct
ingredients of the finest quality. The end
result is the culmination of the efforts of
many different groups and conditions
that meld together, in concert and independently,
to fashion the product.
So it is with building a community.
For many reasons – historical origins
of the Jewish people as a nation, forced
separation from the greater non-Jewish
population requiring mutual support, religious
imperatives requiring communal
structure, etc. – there has been and is an
understanding of the need for mutuality
of efforts in certain areas of support,
help, and services. There is, in fact, an
understanding of the need and benefit in
having certain unique organizations meet
particular needs for the total.
One such institution is the Marcus
Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.
From its beginning in 1904 as the
Young Men’s Hebrew Association, when
the Jewish population of Atlanta was
about 2,000, the organization has grown
and changed to meet the demands of an
estimated Jewish population in 2006 of
120,000 in Metropolitan Atlanta. In addition,
many of its non-Jewish-based services
have gained such an outstanding reputation
that these are sought out and used
by a large number of the general popula-
See DIRECTOR, page 31