Tzedakah Maven: Danny Siegel Danny Siegel discovers and tells the stories of mitzvah heroes. He has been called The World’s Greatest Expert on Microphilanthropy, The Feeling Person’s Thinker and The Pied Piper of Tzedakah.
Traveling Tzedakah The rest started with “traveling tzedakah.” It is a Jewish custom to give some money to a person going on a trip. That person becomes the shali’ah (messenger) for your tzedakah mitzvah. Some people believe that anyone who is shali’ah mitzvah will have a safe trip. “Rather than wait for people to give me a dollar, I began to ask for money and wound up with $955. When I got to Israel, I went in search for the right people and places to give it.”
The Early Years
The search for the right people and places to distribute the money became an ongoing search for mitzvah heroes. Here are some of Danny’s first finds:
Danny says, “My abba, Julius, moved to northern Virginia to set up a medical practice as an old-time country doctor. For more than a half-century he would treat, heal, cure, comfort and care for three generations of patients, thousands in all. I rode with my father often. I witnessed the kind of people he treated: kind people, simple people, people who would give you the shirt off their back, bring you in and feed you if you were hungry…In our community he was known as a ba’al tzedakah, a person who used his tzedakah money wisely.
• Hadassah Levi, who made her life’s work the rescue abandoned infants with Down Syndrome. • Myriam Mendilow, who found Jerusalem’s poor, elderly residents on the streets of the city and gave them respect and new purpose in her program Yad L’Kashish (Lifeline for the Old). • Uri Lupolianski, a young teacher who founded Yad Sarah, which lends medical equipment to those who need it.
“My mother, Edythe Siegel, was the classic tzadeket — not just because she was so involved in Sisterhood, Seaboard Branch of Women’s League and Hadassah. She was wise, recognized needs, responded, cared…”
In its twenty-seven-year history Ziv Tzedakah Fund, which Danny founded, gave more than $13,500,000 to mitzvah heroes and organizations. This money, for the most part, was collected in donations of $10, $18 and $25.
USY United Synagogue Youth (the Conservative youth movement) changed Danny’s life. He was chapter treasurer and president, regional treasurer and president and finally international president, and went on USY Pilgrimage (to Israel) in 1961. In high school, Danny felt the effects of learning differently/ disabilities, ADD (attention deficit disorder), and “poetic tendencies.” He started but didn’t complete, studies to become a rabbi. He holds a bachelor’s degree in literature from Columbia and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Hebrew literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1972 he became a traveling teacher and poet when he drove the Atid (Conservative college program) bookmobile around the country selling Jewish books.
Teaching Tzedakah Throughout the year Danny travels around teaching about tzedakah and Jewish values and reading poetry. Every summer since 1976 he has served as USY Israel Pilgrimage Tzedakah Resource Person. He is the author of twenty-nine books on mitzvah heroes, practical and personalized tzedakah and poetry. Danny says, “There is nothing magical or mystical about it — nothing requiring two Ph.D.s or expertise in software. Just find some mitzvah heroes, find some money, work with them, give to them and be happy.”
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