Create Your Jewish Legacy
A CYJL Commitment Orchestrated
by a Jewish DNA
Dick Friedman with Gail Friedman
In this period of existence, we often read or we often hear uttered the phrase “it’s in the DNA”. The phrase refers to the fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of someone or something especially when it is regarded as unchangeable. My wife Gail and I believe that our DNA is wedded to the deep and abiding texture of Tikkun Olam which mandates that humanity has an obligation and a shared responsibility to heal, repair, and transform the world.
The Create Your Jewish Legacy (CYJL) initiative of the Cincinnati Jewish community to create legacy gift funding and financial support for the needs of the current and the future generations of the community takes its lead from the personal, embedded DNA of Jews to repair and transform the world for now and forever more. Gail and I have had a great number of leadership opportunities which have introduced us to the needs of others. I have personally had the distinct privilege to preside over the efforts of the Hillel Student Center of the University of Cincinnati, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education and the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati. I have witnessed firsthand and seen, most significantly, the eyes of students seeking a home for their Judaism and a Holocaust survivor’s eyes showing me the life of horrific terror that they had endured.
We have benefited from the incomparable personal support and spiritual assistance from the rabbis of historic, K.K.Bene Israel/Rockdale Temple, Rabbis Victor Reichert, Murray Blackman, Harold Hahn , Howard Simon, Mark Goldman and now Sissy Coran and Meredith Kahan. Our CYJL legacy gift is in tribute to the leadership that has gone before us and to those who will inherit the future. It is clear that we know upon whose shoulders we stand and we wish to provide the next generation a set of shoulders to do likewise.
Our confirmation of a CYJL gift has been called for by the language and tenets placed in our last will and testament and facilitated by the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. Your CYJL gift will strengthen our hands.
Mon, October 14 2024
12 Tishrei 5785