February 21, 2008

Case Study: Bequests From Women

By Meira Maierovitz Drazin
An antique jewelry dealer, a teacher, a widow of a babka empire -- what these women have in common is that they left the majority of their estates to charity. Moreover, only one or two organizations received their significant final gifts.

In each of these cases, Jewish National Fund received $500,000 to $1,000,000 to fund projects in Israel. In many of these cases, these women had no prior history with JNF, or certainly not one that could have predicted the generosity of their bequests.

More and more, women are making up the donor pool of estate gifts, leaving large bequests to one or two charities that do not necessarily reflect any prior giving history with the recipient organizations.

According to Russell F. Robinson, chief executive officer of Jewish National Fund in New York City, the organization raises several million dollars each campaign year from bequests. "The demographics are always surprising," said Robinson. "We have received bequests of more than $1 million from donors who previously only planted $18 trees with us and we have even received $1 million from people who never gave us anything. Individuals may often make their most significant gifts through their estates; especially, those who do not have children or who were never married."

"As I tell my clients, when people die without any children, where is the money going to go?"' said David R. Frazer, a tax lawyer in Phoenix, Ariz. "It can go to the government, your family, or charity. People are usually the least enthusiastic about leaving their money to the government."

In the 2007 campaign year, JNF received 10 estate gifts that ranged from $200,000 to $1.3 million. Nine were from women, none of whom had children. Of these 10 donors, four individuals had zero giving history, three were consistent donors of $25 to $100 during a 10 to 15-year period, and three gave gifts that ranged from $3,600 to $87,000 during their lifetimes.

In both 2006 and 2007, JNF received two bequests from women that were each more than $1 million. In the 2008 campaign year, the organization is anticipating two bequests from women that are more than $750,000 pending approval from the New York Attorney General's office.

In all cases but one, the women's bequests represented the bulk of their estate.

May Mann, for example, whom David Frazer represented, left $1.3 million to JNF's work in Israel's underdeveloped southern Negev desert -- $1 million toward establishing a visitor's center at Abraham's Well -- a historic site in the city of Be'er Sheva -- and $300,000 to the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a center for environmental leadership located on Kibbutz Ketura.

Mann and her husband Howard had no children and after designating smaller gifts to family members and another charity, Mann asked Frazer to select a JNF project for her remaining assets.

"The only charities she had knowledge of were JNF, Brandeis University and one other," said Frazer. "Like most Jewish people she had known about JNF for many years, had contributed before, and felt that JNF was the organization which has the greatest impact on the land and people of Israel."

Frazer said that in estate planning, it is not unusual for people to choose one or two charitable organizations that would benefit the most from their bequest, and that attorneys work with their clients to determine which charities they were active in or would like to leave money to owing to the quality of their work.

Sam Blum, an attorney in Coconut Grove, Fla., worked with Sadie Sue Grossman, who left more than $1 million toward JNF's work in the town of Zukim, also in Israel's southern region. He went through a list of 200 charities and yeshivas with Grossman to find something that would "fit the bill."

Grossman, who was 96 when she passed away, had an early career in vaudeville and on the borscht belt before eventually discovering her life's passion: buying and selling antique and estate jewelry. Widowed for half a century, she created Sue's Old Love's, a jewelry business in Cape Cod and Miami. Later, she also had a kiosk in a jewelry arcade and according to Blum she would take the bus to work, sit and sell jewelry all day long, and then take the bus back home to her very modest house.

"She knew she was a wealthy woman but didn't talk about it," says Blum. "Money itself wasn't meaningful to her. She loved her jewelry and loved buying and selling. She made a very nice charitable remainder trust to Hadassah as well as to a local Miami AIDS charity. But she never wanted any recognition during her lifetime-she said, 'there will be a star for me in heaven.'"

In her will, she left half of her business to an Argentine woman she met on the bus and whom she took in as her helper and housekeeper, and the bulk of her estate to JNF.

New York resident Raya Cowan's inspiration came from her attorney. While always interested in Zionist causes, since her husband's death many decades ago, Cowan's support had been more passive. But then it came time to draft her will and while sitting in the office of attorney Robert R. Levine,, JNF's vice president for education

She decided she wanted to start giving money to charity and made a donation of $10,000 to JNF, which according to Levine, was the largest donation she had ever given to anything in her life. From then until she passed away, she wrote a check every time she got an appeal in the mail.

According to Levine, she said that in her will she wanted to leave money to organizations in Israel - i.e. $50K to an Israeli cancer fund because her husband died of cancer -- and the rest to organizations like JNF - she left $1 million -- and she named two others (which received smaller bequests.)

Unlike Grossman, Cowan, who escaped the Holocaust and whose husband built a fortune by owning the buildings his bakeries were in, was not even aware of her wealth. "She knew there was enough to pay her bills and her rent," said Levine, "but was always worried about money. Of course at the end there was more than enough." Childless, she died leaving $2 million--$20K to nieces and nephews and the rest to charity.

In late 2007, JNF was notified by Ella Rubinstein's estate lawyer that they would receive upwards of $750,000 as an unrestricted gift left by the deceased, an educator whose sole asset was a house on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. According to the lawyer, Juliette Levin, "she didn't accumulate a great deal of wealth, just the property that she inherited from her husband that kept increasing in value." While she left $1000 here and there to some distant relatives, the bulk of her estate is bequeathed to JNF.

Isaac Franco, the attorney who drafted Rubinstein's will, knew Rubinstein since he was a young boy and said she hosted a summer camp in her backyard for the neighborhood children who could not afford to attend a regular camp. He describes "Aunt Ella" as "a concerned and generous soul who devoted at least one hour of every day to sitting down and teaching, always in the form of an interesting story."

JNF's records show only that Rubinstein had given less than $1,000 to JNF during her lifetime and neither Franco nor Levin could shed any light on why she chose JNF as the recipient of her final act of charity, only that during her lifetime she was committed to preserving Jewish culture and the existence of the Jewish state.

Hilda Popkin, who left $500,000 to JNF as well as a similar amount to six other charities, is the exception to the other women JNF has seen bequests from recently. For one thing, her estate was between $8 and $9 million at the end of her life.

"She was aware of her own worth but felt she was stewarding it for the world," says her niece and co-executor Iris Cahn Do. "It was very clear which charities would be beneficiaries of her estate. We always referred to them as 'Hilda's charities' and her family knew that she wanted the bulk of her money to go where it would do the most good.

"Our family used to joke that all the forests in Israel came from Aunt Hilda."

Indeed, in addition to other gifts throughout her lifetime, in 2003, JNF received over $77,000 from Popkin as their share of a Charitable Remainder Annuity Trust she had set up for a term of five years. JNF allocated the funds toward its work developing Israel's water resources. Popkin's final gift will go toward beautifying the grounds at Aleh Negev, a rehabilitative village in Israel's Negev desert designed specifically for the needs of mentally and physically impaired people and to provide much-needed services and jobs to the area.

"Our rabbis teach us," said Robinson, "that a true act of "chesed"-the Jewish idea of loving kindness in the sense of a mitzvah-is one that can have no benefit to the person who does it and can never be repaid. These women will never know the extent to which their generosity is making a difference in the lives of the people of Israel-and especially to the new generation of Negev pioneers-and they will never even be able to thank them. But their memory will live on in their generosity and good deeds, and in these final acts of chesed."

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This article is from NPT Instant Fundraising, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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