I Never Let My Children Fundraise

My mother never let me collect charity money.

“We are not schnorrers,” she said. Her father hadn’t liked it. He didn’t think it was appropriate.

And because of that, I never let my own children do it either.

Over the years, they would come home from school with all kinds of very important causes, wanting to knock on doors. I would ask them, “How much do you think you will collect from all the doors you knock on today?”

They would say 300, or 400, or 500 shekels.

I would give them the money and say, “Give this to your teacher, or to whoever is organizing it. I don’t want you knocking on doors, no matter how important the cause is. I don’t want my children to be schnorrers.”

Until this week.

My daughter is already grown. She is over 18. And she came and told me that the Rabbonim had announced that, because of the situation facing Olam HaTorah, the girls needed to help.

Everything has been turned upside down. Government funding on which the yeshivot relied has been stopped, leaving an enormous gap in the support of those precious students who invest their entire world in learning Torah – the text we believe the world was created for.

And even if someone does not believe that, it is the text we received at Har Sinai. Of the approximately 18 million Jews in the world, only a fraction of a fraction devote their lives to learning it. Yet suddenly the Jewish state had decided that it would no longer help preserve this part of our heritage.

The Rabbonim themselves – some already 90 or even approaching 100 years old – have boarded planes and endured exhausting flights to North America, South America and across the world to raise the missing money.

Then came the instruction that the girls, too, needed to take part. They needed to understand how important this was and to donate their own time and energy.

I don’t think anyone really imagined how much they could raise.

Then the Israeli seminary girls were unleashed.

Six shekels at a time. Eighteen shekels at a time. Twenty shekels at a time. They called parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and anyone else they could think of. The total rose by another million, and then another million, until it began approaching tens of millions shekels.

The joke going around is that it should be called **Campaign Sarah Schnorrer** – after Sarah Schenirer, the founder of the Bais Yaakov movement, and the thousands of young Jewish women who had suddenly become determined schnorrers.

Some of these girls had already undertaken to stay completely off computers for the Ten Days of Repentance. Yet even they were taking part in the campaign, fundraising by telephone while remaining offline. Their families report unexpectedly tidy houses, while the girls themselves have rediscovered the pleasure of taking long walks together.

There have been criticisms, and some of them are justified. There is an issue of safety. There is an issue of tzniut. In the seminaries of my daughters, my nieces and other members of my close family, I saw that the girls were told to call only people they knew.

But I myself received dozens of calls from girls I did not know. I have no idea where they got my number. So, yes, there are legitimate questions about safety and boundaries, and they must be taken seriously.

But something extraordinary has happened here too.

My daughter told me yesterday that she still needed 4,800 shekels to finish her target.

“Listen,” I said. “I will give it to you. Give me the account details and I will transfer it.”

“No, Ima,” she said. “I want to be blessed with the bracha of the Rabbonim. They promised a bracha, and I want it. I want to sit with all my friends and make these phone calls. It moves me. I think it’s important.

“It’s not like all those other times when you told us not to collect for this cause or that cause. Here it is Torah. This is the reason we were created. This is the reason we believe the world was created. Bereishit – for Reishit, for Torah, the world was created.”

She insisted so much that I lifted my hands and gave in. I let her go.

I may still have to help her complete her target. I haven’t yet heard exactly how much she raised. But she and thousands of girls in seminaries across the country have already helped raise a sum that nobody expected and nobody dreamed possible.

And they have shown something else too.

For years, one of the charges levelled against the Haredi community has been that we expect other people to support our Lomdei Torah. This campaign has shown that when the need is urgent, the Haredi community can mobilize on an astounding scale. Families who do not necessarily have very much themselves are giving. Girls barely out of school are taking responsibility. An entire community is trying to sustain what it holds most precious.

Not everyone in Israel shares our understanding of Torah learning. I know that. But for us, Torah is not an abstract principle or a political bargaining chip. It is the inheritance that has sustained Am Yisrael for thousands of years – in exile, through persecution and now in our own land.

We believe that Torah protects Am Yisrael. We believe the Jewish people still need it today.

This week, thousands of young women did not merely say that they believed it. They accepted responsibility for sustaining it.

And for the first time in my life, I let my daughter become a schnorrer.