By Joel Magalnick, JTNews Correspondent
Norm Chapman has a plan.
For however long it takes, he will send books to Israel to help children become proficient in English. He has already gotten started.
In the past year, Chapman has sent more than 6,000 books, mostly to the Kiryat Malachi and Hof Ashkelon areas of Israel, and he ships a more boxes every week. He collects from drop-off points at several synagogues around the city and from the Jewish Day School.
Chapman’s inspiration for this book collection project came last December, when he joined a Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle mission, and they stopped in the sister city region of Hof Ashkelon. When he went to one of the schools, he felt a connection right away.
“They’re beautiful kids,” he says. “They came up and grabbed me around the leg and they asked the question, ‘Ma shlomeach,’ which is ‘How are you?’” and it has been a labor of love ever since.
About half of the families in the region are Ethiopians and Russians who had come to Israel within the past 10 years, but still needed help assimilating into the culture. The immersion centers work long hours with limited budgets to enable the families and their children to learn the language and culture of their new country.
One thing Chapman noticed during his visit was a lack of books.
“The library was nicely built, and it had lots of shelves. [The books] only covered one or two shelves. They didn’t have a single children’s English book anywhere about,” Chapman says.
Some of the teachers expressed the need for reading materials, yet as one of Israel’s poorest regions, they had no money to purchase any. Beginning children’s books are much easier for kids of any age to use to learn English, so Chapman decided he would find some.
A year later, boxes of books fill a third of his garage. He says he spends half his week picking up, sorting and shipping the boxes.
He keeps records of every shipment, including the weight, number of books, where it was sent and to whom.
“I’ve been underwriting the expense and it’s not inexpensive,” he says. “It runs about a dollar about a pound and I’ve sent about three or four thousand pounds.”
The appreciation comes in the form of letters from teachers, administrators and new friends from wherever in Israel he has sent his many shipments.
Fortunately, he is not alone. Dina Tanners, a librarian who works at Tree of Life Books & Judaica, comes to Chapman’s Bellevue home a few days a week and helps with the sorting and packing.
Tanners came up with a color-coding system that helps teachers in Israel know each book’s grade-level.
Before this, Chapman said, many of the books sat untouched because the teachers didn’t know what to do with them. When Tanners visited Kiryat Malachi last summer and again in October, she spent several days doing the coding there.
In recent weeks, Chapman has added several more synagogues to his pickup route, and he continues to seek sites for donation drops.
Chapman is no stranger to helping others. He grew up in a home dedicated to performing mitzvot. Though he has spent more than 10 years in the Seattle area, the soft southern lilt of his Shreveport, La. childhood accent stands out whenever he speaks.
“I worked with all the typical Jewish things as I grew up,” he says, such as holding the office of president of Young Judaea and attending the Brandeis Institute in 1948 “during the year of independence.”
Chapman’s father was active in B’nai B’rith and several Zionist organizations, but most importantly he strongly believed in a good education, which meant being chairman of his Shreveport synagogue’s school board.
Those values were passed directly onto Norman. In addition to the book project, Chapman is treasurer for the Jewish Day School, which plans to honor Chapman, his wife Isabella, his daughter Amy Fulton, and son-in-law Doug Fulton at its annual fundraising event next year. He is also a national director for the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Along with Isabella, Norm is a life member of Hadassah. He gives freely to many charities, as well.
“We made a very a serious mistake. When I was at Microsoft, I started making small contributions to maybe 30, 40, 50 different organizations,” he says, “and now I’m on their ‘A’ list.”
“About 90 percent of our contributions go to Jewish causes,” he adds.
In the early ‘90s, the Chapmans and the Fultons came to Seattle at the behest of Microsoft, which had purchased the database program Doug and Amy had created. Chapman had run that company’s finances, and his tenure with Microsoft took him all around the globe as the software behemoth’s first worldwide director of credit.
“The day I retired from Microsoft, roughly five years ago, the phone started ringing,” he says. “After the first six calls, I had enough on my plate to last me for the next 30 years.”
That was long before he began collecting the books. Yet promoting literacy in Israel is only one way he gives of himself to help sustain Judaism’s future.
“I think the future of Judaism is our children,” Chapman says. “If we don’t do what needs to be done now, we’ll lose them. We’ll lose them to disinterest.”
His beliefs manifest themselves pragmatically. He also supports the school of social work in the Hof Ashkelon region. The students at the school work with immigrant teenage girls to be able to make lives for themselves after they finish school.
“The kids have to be educated,” he says. “If they can’t qualify for any kind of position that helps the army, they’ll be rejected….Most of the applications for work in Israel have a space on them to list army experience. If those spaces are left blank, those applications are pushed aside and those girls are left to whatever they need to do to survive, most of which isn’t very pleasant.”
By supporting these students, Chapman says, he is supporting all of Israel, especially in a time when a large section of the population has trouble keeping a roof over its head.
“There’s so much of a need and this country is so dedicated to paying for security to keep the people secure and safe, there’s not a whole lot of extra funds that are available for these other things to be done,” he says.
“The need is tremendous. You feel it when you’re there,” he says. “You don’t have to have anybody tell you that. You see it.”
Norm Chapman is seeking children’s books, preschool toys, children’s music on cassette, and children’s ‘G’ and ‘PG’-rated videos. He especially needs stories with pictures and large print such as fairy tales, first readers (under the fourth grade reading level), beginning-level chapter books, easier science fiction, movie books, short romances, and games and jump ropes for children. He asks that adult books, old magazines, how-to books, and financial or business books not be included in the donations at this time.
Drop boxes can be found at many synagogues around Seattle, Bellevue, and Mercer Island. If you would like to make a donation or need help deciding what will be useful, please call Norm at 425-649-8553.