Acrylic Nails | Bnai Zion Renews Efforts In SoCal

March 29, 2012

Bnai Zion renews efforts in SoCal

By Tom Tugend

Like aged soldiers, Jewish organizations never die. For proof, look to Bnai Zion.

Established in 1908 in New York as the Order of the Sons of Zion B'nai Zion, the group has, over the years, altered its name and mission, and even mislaid its apostrophe. Now well known as Bnai Zion, the group is enjoying an distillate of appetite and funding, inclusive stretching its muscles in the Los Angeles area after a extensive hibernation.

The organization's first role was to supply illness and life insurance at affordable group rates to the rank and file of Jewish immigrants, primarily from Eastern Europe, who were streaming in to the land.

After World War II, Bnai Zion lengthened these services to a new river of Holocaust survivors, and then after that to immigrants from the one-time Soviet Union.

But when the waves of Jewish immigration began shrinking in the early 1950s, the group reinvented itself as the Bnai Zion Foundation and shifted concentration to ancillary 5 definite Israeli medical, educational, girl and inventive institutions: Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa; Ahava Village for Children Youth in Kiryat Bialik, which functions with at-risk kids; the Quittman Center in Jerusalem, a home is to mentally disabled; the David Yellin Academic College of Education in Jerusalem, which attracts secular and eremite Jews together with Muslim and Christian Arabs and new immigrants; and a library and song college of music in Ma'aleh Adumim.

A Western informal office was determined in 1975, and for a whilst flourished beneath the citation of such men as Fred Kahan and Rabbi Jack Simcha Cohen, but in new years has been mostly inactive.

Aptly, the renewal, both nationally and locally, of this group founded to assist immigrants is being sparked by a human who, as a child, left his local Hungary after the 1956 subversion and grew up to turn a affluent entrepreneur.

That man's name is George W. Schaeffer, which might not ring a bell to everybody but is mythological in what is well known as "the veteran beauty industry," quite the spike gloss division.

Arriving in the United States, Schaeffer's parents staid in Brooklyn (as George's accent still attests), and after college he assimilated the family mantle production business. Moving to Los Angeles in 1981, Schaeffer took over a dental supply business and shortly done a of those apparently tiny but life-changing discoveries.

He beheld that the acrylic "porcelains" used to make dentures were identical to, but obviously improved than, the element used for crafting acrylic nails.

Today, Schaeffer's company, OPI Products Inc., creates and distributes 200 shades of spike gloss and is branching out in to body lotions, hairsprays and shampoos, with a of the latter temperament the Orthodox Union (OU) consent seal.

Annual sales advance to about $300 million, Schaeffer said, and in 2010 he sole the firm to Coty. Terms of the sale are confidential, but Bloomberg News reported at the time that Coty had paid about $1 billion in cash.

Schaeffer, as OPI's boss and CEO, remained on the job, as did his 500 employees. Schaeffer proudly celebrated that the really first worker he hired, in 1981, is still working at the company.

Perhaps since his own background, Schaeffer was drawn early to Bnai Zion. He orderly its first girl section whilst still living in New York and has only resolved 6 years as national president.

Last year, a first step in reviving the Los Angeles section was to sinecure Igal Zaidenstein as Western informal director. Born in Israel to parents who had done aliyah from Paraguay, Zaidenstein complicated diplomatic scholarship at Tel Aviv University, graduated from law school and said, "I have a life-long passion to intensify Israel-Diaspora relationships."

Zaidenstein, who formerly served locally as diplomatic confidant is to American Friends of the Citizens' Empowerment Center in Israel, has orderly multi-part rudimentary meetings for Bnai Zion in Los Angeles and is formulation to reactivate groups of supporters in Orange County and San Diego, together with intensify ties with local synagogues.

In a new discussion at his considerable domicile office building in North Hollywood, Schaeffer, wearing an open-neck shirt and suspenders, sharp to wall-size chart in a conference room highlighting the 110 nations in which his products are available. The countries add Dubai, Kazakhstan, Russia (one of his largest customers) and China (where his products are at large counterfeited).

"I'm a three-day synagogue Jew," Schaeffer said, "but we keep kosher at home, and every doorpost in the company's 25 buildings has a mezuzah on it."

He moreover paid is to new restoration of the Young Israel of North Beverly Hills, mentioned to be the oldest Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles.

Schaeffer has been a leading champion of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and he will be respected by the City of Hope on July 21 in Las Vegas.

It bothers Schaeffer that many Jewish charities and institutions outlay up to 30 percent of donations on organizational expenses. At Bnai Zion, he played a key role in substantiating a $30 million endowment, which will casing roughly all of the organization's functional costs and enable all contributions to go to the projects in Israel.

Right after World War II, Bnai Zion had a few 150 chapters in the United States, according to Jack Grunspan, Bnai Zion's national senior manager clamp president. Currently, it has offices in New York, Philadelphia, South Florida, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Grunspan puts the number of contributing members at about 30,000 nationally, and 2,500 in the Los Angeles area. Total contributions advance to between $1.5 million and $2 million annually, a figure Schaeffer would similar to to elevate to $3 million to $5 million a year.

According to the Bnai Zion brochure, the group played a leading role in substantiating the American Red Magen David Adom for Israel, and in helping the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

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