What Tzedakah Really Means: Rabbi Suzanne Singer on Her Gift to HIAS

Rabbi Suzanne Singer has been thinking about justice since a young age. The daughter of an Auschwitz survivor and the granddaughter of Rose M. Singer, who served on the watchdog Board of Corrections in New York City, she was always interested in the practical and philosophical questions raised by a world that so often falls short.

But it wasn’t until her forties, after a long career in public television, that Rabbi Singer went back to school. She was ordained as a rabbi at the age of 50. Now a member of the HIAS Rabbinic Council and a Rabbi Emerita at Temple Beth El in Riverside, California, she has designated the HIAS Foundation as a beneficiary of her pension plan.

Rabbi Singer sees her choice to make such a generous gift to the HIAS Foundation as a natural extension of the many actions she takes to help immigrants in need. She has volunteered everywhere from McAllen, Texas, to Berlin, where she did laundry for Syrian refugees. Their images reminded her so strongly of Jewish refugees from other periods that she knew she needed to help. She has also gone to protest the detention of immigrant children at various facilities around the U.S. She is always looking for a way to help people facing circumstances like the ones her mother faced during the Holocaust.

“I think to myself, it could be any of us,” says Rabbi Singer. “Our history has been that of people who are refugees. My mother lost her whole family at Auschwitz: her parents, her brother, her grandmother. And I just feel like we keep saying ‘never again,’ but we keep repeating history and hardening our hearts against people. I just feel very strongly that I need to support people, to give them a safe place to go.”

Naming the HIAS Foundation as a beneficiary on her pension plan was easy and felt immediately right, says Rabbi Singer.

“Unfortunately,” she says, “Tzedakah often gets translated as charity, and I don’t really think that's a very good translation. To me, charity is: Do you feel sorry for somebody? If you don't feel sorry, you don’t give; if you do, you give. Whereas Tzedakah is an obligation. It’s justice. It’s trying to make the world a better place, and I feel an obligation to do that—in terms of my money as well as in terms of my time and my activities.”

Her only regret? That she can’t do even more. But by helping to build the HIAS Foundation’s endowment, Rabbi Singer knows she is playing in a vital role in ensuring long-term stability and strength for an organization whose work will only become more necessary in the years to come.

“It could be anyone,” she says again. “Because of economic circumstances, political situations, climate change, persecution, any of us could be without a place that’s safe. And I just feel very strongly that I need to support people who are facing that challenge.”