A Broken Charity: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Educational Center [Paperback]

Jack George (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2005

When I arrived to pick up the payroll, I was greeted by the IRS. That day, the IRS closed the charity where I was employed. The days and weeks ahead were like being on a never-ending roller-coaster ride. The Rabbi Bentzion Pil and his wife Mattie had created the charity. It was their baby. They had many struggles while they continually nurtured the Jewish Educational Center through the years. As it grew, the rabbi started one of the first “donate-your-car” programs in the United States. The charity auctioned the cars. During the last years, it brought in more than eight million dollars annually. It became one of the largest used car business in the U.S. It also became the blueprint for other charities to follow. Programs were added, such as English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for the many Russian immigrants, a day school, and a Russian magazine. The money rolled in, yet the accounting system didn’t sufficiently show where the money rolled out. The IRS, the state attorney general, and other agencies began looking at the charity. This is the story as to what really happened during the finals months and days of the charity—before the Rabbi Pil received his sentence.

Product Details

• Paperback: 123 pages
• Publisher: PublishAmerica (May 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1413764908
• ISBN-13: 978-1413764901
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,747,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The plot should not have kept my interest, but it did., July 2, 2005

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Broken Charity: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Educational Center (Paperback)

From the plot, this book would not appear to be all that interesting. The author describes a Jewish charity that is poorly run and eventually closed by the IRS due to major accounting irregularities. There is a great deal of betrayal and deceit, as the perpetrators of the fraud desperately try to maintain their innocence. However, the author is such a good storyteller, I found myself caring about whether the charity survived. Good authors can take a plot that appears weak and make it interesting. George clearly fits into that mold, this is a book that really should not have interested me, but it did.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important Lessons For Everyone In Nonprofit!, June 1, 2005

By 

Graciela Sholander "Author & Writer" (Fort Collins, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Broken Charity: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Educational Center (Paperback)

Just like a dysfunctional family, a charity can look good on the outside--and do great things for the community--but collapse from the weight of internal strife and mismanagement. Such was the case with the Jewish Educational Center (JEC), a once prominent San Francisco-based nonprofit that served the city's Jewish-Russian immigrant population. Its rise and fall are carefully documented in A Broken Charity by someone who witnessed firsthand what went on. Jack E. George was the administrator of Schneerson Hebrew Day School, which operated under the JEC umbrella, when a surprise raid by the IRS signaled the beginning of the end for the public-benefit nonprofit.

Working for an organization accused of serious financial discrepancies, Jack found himself on an unexpected roller-coaster ride. Unable to pay his employees, and with no answers for their questions about the IRS investigation, Jack was torn. His heart urged him to do everything in his power to keep Schneerson open for the sake of the students and families it served and the staff it employed. But his gut told him to find a job elsewhere.

At first his heart won. At the same time that he strove to save the school, he began to see why the JEC was in such trouble. Fraud and false advertising charges were brought against the charity, which had made numerous unsubstantiated claims. One such claim was that 100% of the money the JEC raised auctioning donated vehicles went to fund local programs, including schools and camps for children and job placement assistance for adults. Investigations uncovered that, in fact, less than 20% went to community programs. The rest paid for operating expenses including advertising and salaries.

Many other issues surfaced, from sloppy bookkeeping practices to spur-of-the-moment board decisions that made little sense. Jack was appalled by what looked like cover-ups and deliberate manipulations, including tampering with records. Dozens of bank accounts existed, yet nobody seemed to fully keep track of them. Numerous cash transactions went unrecorded. The genuine efforts made by Jack and others to keep the school open couldn't compete against this level of business practice incompetence.

When the school year ended and 100 students graduated, Jack became the administrator of a summer camp program run by the JEC. He immediately found himself caught between giving the young campers a meaningful camp experience and dealing with the nonprofit's mounting legal and financial troubles. Because of a lack of funds, activities had to be scaled back. For example, advertised field trips to water parks had to be cancelled, and disappointed campers had to settle for school-based art projects instead. Parents began to voice their concern and anger. In addition, Jack had to deal with countless bill collectors and an intrusive media.

Through it all, Jack watched carefully and learned valuable lessons along the way. The JEC did many things right, but its mistakes ultimately led to the organization's downfall. Even after he resigned, Jack kept close track of the JEC and its off-shoot organizations.

Through A Broken Charity, the author reveals in great detail what brought down a large, well-respected charity. He supplies powerful examples and delves well into the confusion he and other staff members experienced as they tried to piece together exactly what was going on. The book flows well, maintaining a good pace and supplying strong anecdotes.

Jack E. George's exposé is a warning to other well-meaning charities to play by the rules and mind the bookkeeping. His main message is that serving the community is not enough--a charity has to be run legally and ethically. If it isn't, it will ultimately fail, hurting and disappointing many people along the way. A Broken Charity is a must-read for anyone in the nonprofit sector.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Look before you donate, July 16, 2005

By 

Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Broken Charity: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Educational Center (Paperback)

In recent years we've started to see the revival of a debate concerning charitable giving. One side advocates staying the present course in which government uses tax dollars to fund a plethora of welfare services for the needy. The other side wants to return to the old days--meaning pre-New Deal days--in which religious organizations solicited monies from wealthy patrons in order to provide a wide range of services aimed at lifting people out of poverty. Government gives so much away in so-called entitlements that we often forget that religious charities still exist today, albeit in a much smaller capacity than the ones operating back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I personally would rather see private organizations taking over the poverty racket because government has a vested interest in keeping poor people poor. That's a controversial statement, no doubt, but one whose veracity finds endless confirmation in the statistics kept by bean counters in both the private and public sector. Once you've dipped into the federal feed trough, it's quite difficult to extract yourself. There's simply no motivation to improve your condition once the government checks start showing up in the mail. That's not to say that private charities are perfect, however.

Jack E. George's "A Broken Charity: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Educational Center" provides an insider's account of how a private charity can fall prey to the very factors that mark big government poverty programs. Arrogance, corruption, no oversight, and obfuscation--the same problems that plague federal services can torpedo a private charity. George was an administrator of several of the Jewish Educational Center's (JEC) programs in California back in the 1990s when trouble struck in the form of an IRS inquiry. The book begins with this troubling investigation, and for the next hundred or so pages George presents background on the organization and the problems that arose after the IRS started their query. Started by Rabbi Bentzion Pil and his wife Mattie, the JEC sought to help recently immigrated Russian Jews find a place in the hectic American society. They ran a school for children, a summer camp type program, a synagogue with regular services, and a host of other minor initiatives aimed at integrating the foreigners. The Rabbi funded these programs by running a profitable business in which donated cars were resold to needy families. This money ostensibly funded the various programs. Or so Rabbi Pil and his wife claimed.

Everything fell to pieces after a warehouse fire destroyed one of the car lots associated with the charity. California authorities jumped into the fray, filing charges claiming the JEC misappropriated funds from the car sales. They charged that Rabbi Pil and his wife spent thousands of dollars earmarked for the charity on their own son's bar mitzvah. Moreover, the house owned by the Rabbi came into his possession in a most suspicious manner. These problems exacerbated the difficulties faced by George, the other employees of the JEC, and the various programs. Key personnel suddenly quit or resigned, replaced by colorful people with questionable backgrounds. An old civil rights warhorse by the name of Carol Ruth Silver was brought in to manage the JEC's public reputation. An accountant, Mamie Tang, arrived on the scene to handle the money, money that George discovered was increasingly scarce or would suddenly pop up out of nowhere. The author began to ask serious questions about the true motives of the people running the JEC. Oddly, he stayed with the organization long after Pil and his minions declared bankruptcy and founded a different charity that would soon engage in the same problematic behaviors that sank the original JEC. "A Broken Charity" is a disturbing account of financial skullduggery taken to the nth degree.

What you see is what you get with "A Broken Charity." George walks the reader through every upsetting aspect of a charity run by criminals without ever coming out and labeling them as con artists, unfortunately. That's one of the problems I had with the book. On nearly every page of the narrative, Jack George expresses in no uncertain terms his concerns with the unfolding shenanigans committed by the Pils, Carol Ruth Silver, and Mamie Tang (who faced charges for an unrelated pyramid scheme involving millions of dollars). Yet the author stayed with the JEC long after most people of average intelligence would have ran for the door. Even his own bout with financial hardship, caused in no small part by the failure of the Pils to give this guy his paycheck, didn't send him into the streets looking for a job. Why? I started thinking of words like "dunderhead" and "dupe" to describe George before realizing something important. Most honest people, especially someone involved in a charity, would probably rationalize these sorts of problems instead of running out on the organization. He still should have left shortly after the IRS began investigating, in my opinion, but I think I understand why he stayed on. He just didn't want to believe anything was wrong.

Another point I'd like to make about this book deals with the shady way the Pils tried to cover up their wrongdoing. Instead of closing the doors immediately and limiting the damage, these schmucks hired Carol Silver to employ the most scurrilous attempts at damage control I've seen outside of Washington, D.C. She routinely used the kids in the programs to try and shame the judicial system into dropping the charges, and claimed that "religious persecution" was behind the government's actions to close down the JEC. Neither of these assertions possessed any validity, but that didn't stop the Pils from shamelessly using them to escape prosecution. I've always been suspicious of anyone who tries to get what they want by wailing about "the children." Now I know why. Highly instructive, this book called "A Broken Charity," and highly upsetting. Donate at your own risk.