Leonard Fein, who spoke earlier this month at the San Diego Jewish Book Fair, met with HERITAGE to urge that the local Jewish community follow the lead of other communities across the nation and commit to finding volunteers—and funds—to read to children in schools.  He also provided information on the program to Tina Friedman, director of the community relations committee of the United Jewish Federation.

Fein said the idea had its genesis when former President Bill Clinton’s administration tried unsuccessfully to mobilize one million volunteers across the country to read to students.  Fein promptly pledged to then Secretary of Education Bill Riley that he would attempt to persuade  the Jewish community to contribute 100,000 of those volunteers.  In the next several years, he said, 23 national Jewish organizations became part of a coalition to combat illiteracy.

Notwithstanding those efforts, the 100,000 goal for the Jewish community still is a long way off—and realization of the overall goal of one million volunteers seems even more remote.  But Fein said he is not deterred.  Perhaps, he said, “by the time we are ten years old, 100,000 people will have been engaged in this program in one capacity or another.”

In addition to classroom tutors, he said, “there are now increasingly book drives; there are increasingly volunteer readers at pediatric clinics…and in a number of communities—Hartford, Boston, Los Angeles—increasingly if you go to a bar mitzvah luncheon you will see that the center pieces are new books that people have been asked to contribute.”

The literacy campaign is “beginning to take off and in some communities—Boston, San Francisco, San Antonio—it is the signature social action project of the Jewish community.”

Fein said he has met volunteers ranging in age from 8th grade students at Jewish Day Schools, who take regular class field trips to urban schools to read to primary school students, to volunteers who are octogenarians.

“I met a couple in San Francisco; he’s 85, she’s 82; they’re survivors of the Holocaust,” Fein said.  “They are in the schools every week.  And if you look at other older people—it seems as if they had been sitting by the phone waiting for someone to call and say ‘don’t go yet, there is work for you.’  It’s a real mitzvah for them.”

In his hometown of Boston, he said, 8th graders from the Solomon Schechter day school tutor 2nd graders at an inner city school.  “A yellow school bus pulls up; 60 or so Schechter kids pile out of the bus; they all find their tutees, and it is 1:1.  These hulking eighth graders are reading on the floor next to the kids who are sitting on chairs—there aren’t enough chairs for them.   It is an all-Black school, and the little second graders are cadging yarmulkes from the heads of the Schechter kids.”

The teacher of the class loves the program, Fein adds. “She says, ‘I’ve got 29 kids in that class; how much at one time can I do?’  Then I discovered that the Schechter parents who are paying $13,000 a year tuition have no objection to a whole morning out of their kids’ studies for them to be tutors.  And then I realize that $13,000 a year is more than the average household income of the kids that they are tutoring.  These are wtwo worlds that otherwise would never intersect.”

The 8th graders at Schechter school had other activities like a trip to Israel and a trip to Washington D.C. At the end of the year, they were asked to evaluate all their activities.  “All of the kids wrote that tutoring was the most significant experience,” Fein said.  “It is magic what happens.”

In Los Angeles, where the program has the backing of the Jewish Federation, Los Angeles Dodger Sean Green has become a spokesman for the literacy program.  His affiliation was announced at a Dodger home game, in the presence of 80 ninth graders from the Shalhevet Modern Orthodox Day School and their first-grade tutees.”

At the elementary schools, tutors “try to engage the imagination as well as the intellect of the kids, so that it is not just a struggle to decode some black marks on a white page, but to let the kid know that there is a story here, and that if you can decode the black marks on the page, it is a treasure,” Fein said.  “There are kids by the way in many of whose homes there is not a book, so they get books through this program.”

He said he has watched the process unfold many times, whereby “kids will point and syllabalize, and one day they will read, and you can see the tutor’s face—it’s almost an occasion for tears, a celebration.  You have inducted a kid into that world.”

Although there is no direct connection between the Mazon program and the campaign for literacy, Fein suggests there is a natural progression “to move beyond giving money to feed the hungry into advocacy for programs to do away with hunger…Literacy is dealing in a sense with a symptom of poverty, but it is also a cause.”

Fein said he started Mazon in 1984 after seeing a man in a large car pull into the parking lot of  Congregation Valley Beth Shalom in the San Fernando Valley.  “The man who got out of it was introduced as the temple caterer,” Fein recalled.  He not only had an exclusive at Valley Beth Shalom but at a number of other large congregations in the area.

“Flying back to Boston, I started figuring what American Jews spend on catered celebrations,” he said.  “In 1984, my estimate was somewhere between $500 million and $800 million a year, and I had the only ‘Eureka’ idea I ever had.  I thought what would happen if we successfully got people to voluntarily add a three percent surcharge to that?”

This year, said Fein, Mazon will disburse its 25 millionth dollar.  “We are giving 40 percent of our money to advocacy organizations and about 60 percent to multi-purpose centers,” he said.

People across the country have incorporated Mazon into their ritual observances.  Fein, along with my wife Nancy and me, were at dinner with Louise and Jay Winheld, the latter of whom told of using a donation to Mazon as payment to the child who finds the afikomen during the Passover seder.  Other families contribute to Mazon the equivalent cost of a meal that they didn’t prepare because they were fasting for Yom Kippur.

“It’s interesting being the father of a ritual,” Fein said, in introducing a story about a bat mitzvah celebration he recently attended in Connecticut.  The girl had insturcted guests not to give her gifts for the occasion, but instead to make donations to the literacy campaign.

When asked what prompted her to do that, she said she had been inspired by her older sister’s bat mitzvah, at which the sister had suggested in lieu of gifts contributions should be made to Mazon.