By Manny Frishberg , JTNews Correspondent
These are hard times for commercial real estate in Seattle, which also means harder times for Jewish day schools in the area.
The connection between the two is the Samis Foundation, which controls the 500 properties acquired over the years by Samis Land Company founder Sam Israel. Samis’ holdings span from Pioneer Square, where it owns 14 historic buildings including the venerable Smith Tower, all the way to Moses Lake. Several schools, including the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle, the Seattle Hebrew Academy and the Northwest Yeshiva High School have been on the receiving end of Samis Foundation grants.
Samis officials have notified those schools in the past month that their grants will be cut over the next budget cycle.
“Most of the money the Samis Foundation gives us, and I think for most of the schools, is for scholarships for parents and for helping pay for the teachers’ health insurance,” said Rabbi Shmuel Kay, headmaster of the Seattle Hebrew Academy. “As you can imagine, those two areas are areas that seem to be getting more difficult. Meaning, the health insurance has been jumping up by ridiculous amounts of money, like 25 percent the last two years in a row. The Samis Foundation couldn’t keep up with that even before they would reduce anything.”
Rabbi Rob Toren, grants director of the Samis Foundation said last week that the fall-off in the real estate market has forced them to make a 17.5 percent cut in money available for grants in next year’s funding cycle.
Final funding decisions will be made by the foundation board at their March meeting.
Toren said cutting back on funding this year does not mean that Samis is in difficult financial straits, but reflects the trend in the Seattle-area real estate market in general. The Daily Journal of Commerce reported in 2002 that annual giving by the Samis Foundation had reached $3.5 million, up from $1.5 million in 1996. Toren said the foundation distributed approximately $3.8 million in 2003. Grants are likely to exceed $3 million for 2004.
This is in addition to a one-time matching grant of $4 million the foundation announced last October for the Seattle Hebrew Academy’s building fund, to help refurbish the brick and terra cotta school building on Capitol Hill. The historic 1909 building sustained heavy damage in the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake.
The Samis Foundation was established in 1987 with a mission to fund organizations and projects that enhance the quality and continuity of Jewish education in Washington and the State of Israel. Sam Israel died in 1994 at the age of 95.
Each year, the foundation gives away the profits generated from Israel’s checkerboard of real estate holdings, and one of its core activities has been to provide funds for Jewish day schools in the area. Four out of five dollars given by the Samis Foundation go principally to support Jewish education in the Puget Sound area in contributions to building and capital funds, as well as in scholarships.
Samis also supports a variety of programs and causes in Israel, including immigrant resettlement, wildlife preservation, archaeological excavations and museums, university scholarships, and ongoing support for family members of Israeli soldiers.
Administrators at several area schools said they have been told to expect the reductions to be on the order of between 9 and 15 percent of last year’s grants. Samis uses a complex formula to determine how much each school will get, based on the funds they have received during the last three years for scholarships and tuition support, according to Rabbi Toren.
Everyone who spoke to the Transcript on the subject emphasized they consider the foundation’s commitment to Jewish education as strong as ever, and that they are grateful to the organization for their ongoing support.
“I don’t want to portray it that we’re upset with the Samis Foundation, because we have such great appreciation for everything they do,” said SHA’s Rabbi Kay.
Cris Schatz, administrator at the Seattle Jewish Community School agreed.
“Even with the reduction, we still feel like we have their full support,” she said. “We thank God everyday and whenever anybody hears about us, they all say, ‘We need a Samis.’ Everybody needs a Samis.”
She also said she understood the situation is a reflection of the generally rough economic conditions in Washington and around the country, adding that tough times would make it harder to compensate by getting more from other funders.
“There’s a statewide recession. Nobody is increasing,” said Schatz. “Everybody is either freezing or decreasing. Our development office is just going to have to step up its efforts and we’re going to have to make it up elsewhere.”
Still, despite their understanding attitude, the school administrators said the reductions would put an added burden on them. Rabbi Bernie Fox, principal of Northwest Yeshiva High School, said, “We’re going to have to both increase tuition and cut programming.”
“It definitely is affecting us,” Rabbi Kay said. “We’re put in a position where we’re not really going to complain to them because we appreciate so much that they do for us. But we do have to make some cuts in our programming in order to have a balanced budget. We hope that the Jewish Federation will able to be a little bit more generous. We don’t know during these times whether they will be, but we’re hoping that they will be.”
“I certainly expect a cut in our funding. We’ve been alerted to that,” said John Zito, who took over as Head of School last summer at the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle.
He said he knows the cuts will have a serious impact but could not say what it would mean specifically to their program until they receive the final word from Samis and complete their own budget process for the coming year.
“The main thing to know,” said Schatz, “is that part of our policy is that no family is denied SJCS based on their ability to pay. We will not, as a policy, stop taking students who need financial aid.
“We’ll make it up somewhere else. We have an auction every year, so we’ll have to make up that shortfall with our own fundraising,” Schatz added. “We also feel certain that when the economy turns around, they’ll be right back in there.”