JCRS set to celebrate ‘Grateful Ned’ Goldberg tomorrow
By ALAN SMASON, Special to the CCJN
On Saturday night, the Jewish Children’s Regional Service (JCRS) will be holding its seventh annual “Jewish Roots” fundraiser at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, 555 Canal Street, beginning with a cocktail reception at 6:30 p.m. The honoree will be longtime executive director Ned Goldberg, who will be honored for his more than three decades of leadership.
An earlier picture of Ned Goldberg. Goldberg will be honored at the JCRS Roots of Cabaret tomorrow night at the Marriott Hotel. (Photo courtesy JCRS)
Meanwhile, at the Smoothie King Center, Dead and Company, the remnants of the former Grateful Dead band will be playing a rescheduled gig and so after 30 years, Goldberg has decided to label himself “Grateful Ned” for all that has happened to him during his tenure at the oldest Jewish children’s charity in the country.
Previous “Jewish Roots” concerts have been part fundraiser, part entertainment and have focused on Broadway music, Jewish music, comedy, jazz and other musical forms.
This year’s “Jewish Roots of Cabaret” will feature local cabaret star Leslie Castay, a former Broadway performer, who will sing with accompaniment by pianist and arranger Jefferson Turner and former JCRS president Bruce Miller on drums.
Goldberg, a native of Cincinnati, moved for seven years to Cleveland prior to his moving to West Palm Beach at the age of 29. He spent eight years there before moving to New Orleans to assume the JCRS position. Besides securing a great job, Goldberg also met his future wife, Wendy, at that time. “I was here a couple of weeks when I met her,” he recalled in a phone interview with the CCJN. “Then, because I had lived in all these cities, we had a wedding tour. We had a small wedding in New York and then we had parties in West Palm Beach, in New Orleans, in Cleveland and in Cincinnati.”
Wendy Goldberg, who had started work at the New Orleans Jewish Community Center right out of college, is now the associate director of the JCC and has worked there for over 35 years.
When Goldberg began his tenure at JCRS, he had three full-time employees. Today he has a full-time staff of five and an additional five or six employees who work part-time.
From left Wendy Goldberg, JCRS executive director Ned Goldberg and comedians Wendy Liebman and Avi Liberman at the “Roots of Comedy” event. (Photo by Alan Smason)
The JCRS coverage area is comprised of seven states: Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma. “I replaced a husband and wife (Sanford and Viola Weiss) who ran the agency for 42 years,” Goldberg commented.
“When I came basically we were really impacting 200 kids a year,” he said. “Now it’s over 1,700 and chances are those 200 kids would have gotten one service from us in a given year. Now those 1,700 might get two, three or more things from us a year.”
Goldberg points to the numbers and sizes of college scholarship grants that have increased during his tenure. “When I started there were 40 to 50 college students who were probably getting help us in a given year,” he said. “Now we have about 120 college kids a year that get aid from us.”
The average award when he started was not more than $1,000, he stated. “Now it’s only about $2,500, but you have to multiply that by four years and some kids are getting more than that. We have a lot of kids getting awards for four consecutive years in undergraduate school and sometimes a little help for graduate school too.”
Special needs cases have also increased under Goldberg’s administration from a low of five or ten students to as many as 70.
Camperships to Jewish summer camps have also registered significantly under his term of office. Goldberg also points to the great work being done by the P.J. Library program, which gets reading material to children for free.
“I’m not proud of the exclusivity,” Goldberg concluded, “the fact that it’s just Jewish kids, but when people give, they know it’s going to help Jewish kids and we have a number of important services they can choose. I think it’s a pillar for the continuity of family life, but also Jewish community.”
