Stephen D.
Solender and
Peggy Tishman |
UJA-FEDERATION OF NEW YORK
Peggy Tishman Honored
For Charitable Leadership
By
Tim Boxer
 ERE’S
a switch: UJA-Federation of New York held a dinner at the Pierre
Hotel and didn’t ask for contributions. You know they need money,
especially now when they created an Israel Emergency Fund with $10
million raised in four days.
Executive vice president John S. Ruskay
explained that the event was being held “to honor two people who
have given their lives to our sacred mission.”
He presented Peggy Tishman with the Alan
C. Greenberg Keepers of the Flame Award and executive vice president
emeritus Stephen D. Solender with the Lifetime Achievement
Award.
Sixteen years ago, Tishman helped merge the
Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and United Jewish Appeal. She
became its first president.
Current president Larry Zicklin
marveled: “No one else could have achieved that and still be loved
enough to be honored here.”
On video, Tishman told how she grew up in a
home where “being Jewish gave my father indigestion.”
Her family was far removed from their heritage.
Her parents never discussed the Holocaust in the ‘30s and ‘40s.
In fact, she said, they sent her to a private school where she
learned “all the Methodist prayers.”
Alan C.
“Ace” Greenberg and
Peggy Tishman |
She found her destiny through two people from
the Federation who “converted” her. One gave her the book, Jews,
God and History, which she found “so meaningful.”
“All
of you were way ahead of me in being Jewish,” she said. “We are
such special people. We can revel in it.”
Calling the Palestinian suicide bombers
“homicide maniacs,” Israeli Consul General Alon Pinkas
said the solution to end the conflict is to erect “a Berlin
Wall” to separate Israelis from West Bank Arabs.
Otherwise, he warned, due to the spiraling
growth of the Arab population, Jews will cease to be a majority in
their own land.
Israel, he said, must remain a Jewish state and
a democracy. But if the Arab demographic growth overwhelms the
Jewish population, “Zionism will no longer be valid. Soon we will
pay a price in terms of our own identity.”
He said he’d be “very comfortable if there
would be a Berlin Wall separating us. I don’t need their culture.
I don’t wait for the Qalqilya Symphony Orchestra to play in Tel
Aviv.”
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