$900K Raised on Charity Site After Brooklyn Dad’s Tragic Death
Image by courtesy of charidy.com
(JTA) — On Sunday night, the Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn was shocked by the sudden death of Nadiv Kehaty, 30, a father of four.
Kehaty, a real estate agent who helped found a local Crown Heights synagogue named Itchke’s Shtiebel, did not have life insurance. He collapsed at an event Sunday night at his son’s yeshiva school, suffering an apparent heart attack.
Fortunately, one of Kehaty’s closest friends was Moshe Hecht, a co-founder of Charidy.com, a crowdfunding platform that matches donors willing to quadruple people’s donations to charity and nonprofit causes.
Hecht got together with some of Kehaty’s other friends and decided to start a Charidy campaign for the Kehaty family. The results were inspiring.
Since Monday, the Charidy campaign, combined with a smaller (but nevertheless substantial) campaign started on fellow crowdfunding site GoFundMe, has raised over $900,000.
In Hecht’s words, the cause “went viral.”
“It was obvious that a lot of people donating didn’t know [Nadiv] and that this campaign went well and beyond his first circle of friends and family,” Hecht said.
Charidy, which was founded by Hecht, Yehuda Gurwitz and Ari Schapiro in 2013, partners each campaign with “Matchers,” who are willing to quadruple the total donation pool. Unlike other platforms that offer campaigns varying lengths of time to reach a goal, each Charidy campaign has only 24 hours to raise its target amount — and no money is earned if the goal isn’t reached.
Most of the nonprofits that have raised money through Charidy have been Jewish organizations, because it was first publicized in New York’s Chabad community. However, Hecht says that his goal is to expand its base of users beyond the Jewish community. In April, for example, the company is planning a day of fundraising for nonprofits of all kinds that aid victims of sexual abuse.
So far, Hecht says that Charidy has a 100 percent success rate, meaning that every campaign has reached its goal in 24 hours.
The $702,398 raised by the Kehaty Charidy campaign (which reached its goal of $253,000 in two hours) was by far the largest amount of money raised in the company’s short lifespan. Hecht said that the day of the campaign drew 50,000 unique visitors to the site — more than double the traffic of any previous day, including one day that involved 20 separate campaigns.
“It’s interesting that over the last few days everyone thought Nadiv was his best friend,” Hecht said. “He was literally the guy with the biggest heart in the whole world. Really a larger than life person.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
