Coastal Virginia Magazine presented the publication’s annual Giving Back Awards at a ceremony last month at MOCA in Virginia Beach. Tidewater Jewish Foundation was one of the 15 nonprofit organizations and seven businesses of various sizes and visions that were honored.
According to Leona Baker, editor-in-chief of Coastal Virginia Magazine, the annual awards recognize “some of the region’s outstanding nonprofit organizations and businesses that make our communities and the lives we lead here safer, healthier, happier and more equitable for all who call Coastal Virginia home.”
Among the published reasons for TJF’s recognition are:
• Serving as the philanthropic pillar of the Tidewater Jewish community and instilling importance of philanthropy across generations;
• $58 million in legacy gifts for the Jewish community anticipated;
• Recently established Feldman Family Medical & Health Professions Student Scholarship to award up to $10,000 a year to Jewish students; and
• $540,000 was granted from TJF donors, directed to partner agencies working on the ground in war-torn Ukraine.
When Russia invaded Ukraine and “refugees began spilling across bordering countries,” says Naomi Limor Sedek, TJF’s president and CEO, “an estimated 200,000 Jews were living in Ukraine, many of whom were trapped in conflict zones in east Ukraine or fled the fighting.”
Support for the Jewish community was urgently needed. The global Jewish community rallied its resources and came together, drawing from more than a century of crisis response experience to aid those Jews who remained in Ukraine, those trying to evacuate, and the thousands of refugees who have now spread across Europe and other countries.
“The Tidewater Jewish Foundation provided a $25,000 grant to the United Jewish Federation Ukraine Emergency Fund. Nobody anticipated the scale or length of the fighting. In FY2022, Tidewater Jewish Foundation donor-advised fund holders granted $540,000 to Ukraine emergency relief, with over $440,000 going directly to the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater’s Ukraine Emergency Fund,” says Limor Sedek. The UJFT Fund was created, she notes, to help with a variety of issues, such as securing the local community and its institutions, maintaining critical welfare services, launching an emergency hotline, securing five Jewish schools, and training staff to manage crisis needs.
“Our donors also recommended grants to the following organizations: Friends of United Hatzalah, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American National Red Cross, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, and Agudath Israel of America,” according to Limor Sedek.