By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Dr. Bob Rubenstein and Marie Raftery say among their greatest pleasures in almost 41 years of marriage has been the creation and maintenance of a fund at Jewish Family Service which from 2008 to the present has awarded 320 scholarships to 160 students.
Maximum awards have been increased to $10,000 from a previous high of $5,000 in response to inflation. Minimum awards remain at $2,500.
“I think that people who don’t give in some way or another of their time or of their funds are missing a big part of life,” Rubenstein, a real estate investor and retired ophthalmologist reflected during an interview Monday at the JFS headquarters on Balboa Avenue. “They’re missing satisfaction and enjoying other people’s success.”
Raftery elaborated: “For us, it is very satisfying to be able to do that. It’s an honor. I’m grateful for having the opportunity to do it. There’s an adage that people may forget what you said to them but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.”
The David Rubenstein Memorial Scholarship, named for Bob’s late son from a previous marriage, keeps David’s “keeps him alive, keep him not just a memory, but a constant,” Rubenstein reflected.
The scholarship has been co-funded since 2014 by an anonymous donor with other contributions from a variety of sources. Although scholarships are exclusively for financially strapped members of the San Diego County Jewish community, another regular contributor to the fund is an Irish Catholic man whose $10,000 annual gift pays tribute to a Jewish couple who employed him as a young man at their dry-cleaning establishment.
“The two individuals that he worked for were Holocaust survivors. And he said every time he looked at the tattoos on their arms, he thought I can’t imagine what those people went through and yet, they’re so good to me. They’re so honest in their business.” The man moved to San Diego many years ago, and he “again worked for a Jewish family and it was the same experience that he had.”
Marie Raftery and Bob Rubenstein provide the money for the scholarships, but have purposely excluded themselves from deciding on who should receive them. That decision is left to a committee of seven people, active within the Jewish community: Kira Finkenberg, Oz Laniado, Lev Mizan, Darren Schwartz, Fern Siegel, Brad Slavin, and Jill Stone.
Many of the recipients are college students needing help with such expenses as tuition, room and board, books, school fees, and academic supplies. Others have been granted scholarships to attend firefighter training classes, pursue graduate studies, and attend rabbinical school. To qualify for the awards, they must be part of the Jewish community, live in San Diego County, and their adjusted gross family income must not exceed 80 percent of the median income in the county.
One scholarship recipient immigrated from Iraq. He told the committee there were two things that would get a person killed in that country. One is being gay; the other is being Jewish. And he was both. JFS helped him resettle and he went to school, Raftery recounted. “He finished school, has a job, and from his first paycheck, he gave a donation to the scholarship.”
Another noteworthy grantee was a homeless woman who lived in her vehicle. At the JFS Safe Parking Program, she learned about the scholarship, applied, and the award helped her attend graduate school.
Yet another recipient used her scholarship to complete a course in acupuncture.
Recipients are encouraged to “give back” to the community in the form of volunteer work for a nonprofit organization. It’s not required that organization be a Jewish one, but many recipients choose to involve themselves in the betterment of the community.
“They’ve worked at Hillel; they’ve worked at Federation; they’ve worked in the community and they’ve given back in that manner. They maintain their Judaism and support it,” said Raftery, a well-known Jewish community volunteer and donor who is a past board president of Jewish Family Service.
JFS provided written comments from a number of past recipients.
Liora Jaffe won scholarships for the two academic years at UC Berkeley between 2010 and 2012, and went on to become a JDC (Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) Fellow in Germany. Currently she is serving as a community engagement program manager for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) in Europe.
Shaindle Goodwin Suss received scholarship awards to pursue an undergraduate degree in psychology at Touro College, for the 2017-2019 academic years. This led to a master’s degree in social work and then “I got a job in San Diego at Friendship Circle,” a program geared toward the Special Needs population.
Jeremy Cronig, a UCSD graduate student in international affairs, obtained a scholarship without which “I am unsure if it would have been financially feasible to attend graduate school in San Diego.” Now living in Oxford, England, his friends there are Jewish and “we regularly attend and host Shabbat dinners and celebrations for holidays.”
The next application period comes at the end of next January. Email inquiries may be addressed to scholarship@jfssd.org.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.