Chabad Hits the Streets for Facebook Votes and Cash
A few weeks ago, while walking past the fountain at Lincoln Center, a young Lubavitch teenager approached me with a laptop in his hands. He asked if I had a second to vote for his school on the Kohl’s Cares for Kids Internet contest, in which the department store chain is giving away a total of $10 million to 20 schools based on Facebook votes.
Well, apparently tactics like this are paying off — Great Neck N.Y.’s, Silverstein Hebrew Academy, a Chabad-Lubavitch school, is currently in the lead, with over 82,000 votes. According to JTA, of the 20 finalists, 12 are Jewish schools, and of these 12, eight are Chabad-Lubavitch.
I’m a little uncomfortable with a school employing its students to fundraise on its behalf. Unlike Chabad’s traditional “street intercept” methods, such as giving out candles on Friday afternoons, there is no educational or outreach value in having strangers sign into their Facebook accounts. On the other hand, efforts like this will help schools raise an extraordinary amount of money, which will almost certainly benefit the students.
So congrats to all the finalists, and kudos to Kohl’s. Voting ends on September 3. If you’d like to participate, log into Facebook and click here — with or without a yeshivah bocher by your side.
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
