Contact B'nai B'rith

1120 20th Street NW, Suite 300N Washington, D.C. 20036

info@bnaibrith.org

202-857-6600

PictureRhonda Love

“The Disaster Relief Fund is open and needs support. Help us be ready by donating to the B’nai B’rith Disaster Relief Fund at https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/bbi-disaster-relief.”

You may have seen that sentence in a news release or an appeal from B’nai B’rith. In a recent two month period, the fund was opened to support assistance to victims of flooding in Texas and the earthquake in Nepal.

Technically, the B’nai B’rith Disaster Relief Fund is always open—we gratefully accept donations to our general disaster fund that are not designated for a specific disaster, because we know that there is no date on the calendar to plan for when these natural disasters occur. Disasters that are man-made, such as terrorist attacks, will occur with no science to understand them.

Since the mid 1800s, B’nai B’rith got involved in responding to disasters with the creation of our Disaster Relief Fund. Domestically and across the globe, the fund provides money to assist victims of a disaster via partners in the community or for the first responders who travel there to provide their expertise for the emergency. 

The impact of any disaster is devastating, but a disaster hitting poor, heavily populated areas makes the devastation more devastating as much of these locations already have overloaded services that are dealing with the underserved population. 

B’nai B’rith is ready to respond once a disaster occurs. A committee comprised of volunteer leaders and staff reviews the information about the disaster that has occurred and determines the need to allocate funds. An appeal is made for donations to enable our response. We receive requests for funding assistance from local community leaders, or we seek out partners in the area that has been impacted. 

We dedicate much of our response to “unmet needs,” which may not have already been provided by others. We also know that there are phases of a disaster that will meet our criteria, at the beginning of the emergency, during recovery efforts and finally, rebuilding. 

Long after a disaster has been in the headlines, there is need for assistance. Some distributions are completed in a month, and some have taken up to five years for the project that has been allocated to reach completion. 


B’nai B’rith’s history of providing disaster relief is part of our core mission of humanitarian aid.  As anniversaries of major disasters come along, we often reflect on the impact of the funds provided by our donors. 

For example, in April 1995 the B’nai B’rith Disaster Fund provided scholarships to the children of government workers who were killed in the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City.

Twenty years later, these children are grown, still missing a parent, but they have had assistance with their education by people who cared about them enough to make a donation. 

Since that disaster, B’nai B’rith has supported many other projects in the United States and around the world, providing close to $3 million in assistance projects. 

The B’nai B’rith Disaster Relief Fund is always open.

We cannot predict the future or know where help will be needed, but you can help us be ready to respond today. 


Rhonda Love is the Vice President of Programming for B’nai B’rith International. She is Director of the Center of Community Action and Center of Jewish Identity. She served as the Program Director of the former District One of B’nai B’rith. In 2002 she received recognition by B’nai B’rith with the Julius Bisno Professional Excellence Award. This June will mark her 38th anniversary at B’nai B’rith. To view some of her additional content, Click Here.