Young Jewish Professionals Answer Call for Funds : Israel: Lawyers and doctors are contributing to Operation Exodus for Soviet and Ethiopian refugees.

Fund raising has been a preoccupation of the organized Jewish community for decades, but the prospect of anti-Jewish pogroms abroad and the memory of 6 million Jews slain during World War II have mobilized many young people.

As a result, young professionals in Los Angeles are joining those elsewhere to dig deep for contributions to an unprecedented fund drive for transportation and settlement of Soviet and Ethiopian immigrants in Israel.

At a recent gathering underneath the dangling airplanes of Santa Monica’s Museum of Flying, more than 450 people, many of them doctors, lawyers and bankers in their late 20s and 30s, pledged a total of $458,238.

Unlike the 1930s and ‘40s, when American Jews had little political clout and the fate of European Jewry was unclear until it was too late, “our generation can see what’s happening,” said Robert Meth, 37, local co-chairman of the fund-raising drive known as Operation Exodus.

“We have the chance of doing something now, or looking back years from now at what could have, or should have, been done,” Meth said, adding that his parents managed to flee Europe before the mass slaughter began but that other relatives did not.

Jack Simcha Cohen, rabbi of the Shaarei Tefila Synagogue and former president of the Southern California Board of Rabbis, said he sees a greater interest among some young people in many aspects of Jewish life, including fund raising and religious observance.

“These people are proud, they are positively affected by Israel, and they will never allow themselves to give up Judaism totally,” he said.

But Mark Schwartz, a banker who attended the Santa Monica fund-raiser, said that while more people are getting involved in Operation Exodus, he did not feel that it was necessarily connected with a return to religion.

“People who don’t necessarily identify themselves as Jews, who don’t practice the religion, see this as an opportunity to feel Jewish without doing things they dread or don’t like, like the religious rituals,” he said.

As contributors lined up to announce their pledges at the Santa Monica fund-raiser, organizers turned over pieces of cardboard on a huge diagram of a passenger plane, revealing photographs of Jews who are waiting to leave the country.

“It’s like reaching out and touching the merchandise. It’s like reaching out and touching your brother,” said Monty Hall, the evening’s master of ceremonies.

Meth, a family physician at Kaiser Permanente, pledged $15,000 last year and promised another $25,000 after a speech to the Santa Monica audience by Simcha Dinitz, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, who heads the rescue effort as chairman of the Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency.

“I don’t eat out much, I don’t buy a lot of new clothes and I’m single,” Meth said. Then he laughed and said that despite his mother’s urgings to marry, “there’s not a lot that might tolerate me giving away quite that much money.”

Meth’s pledge was one of the largest, but Stuart Rossman, a Boston lawyer who on Sunday will become chairman of the Young Leadership Cabinet of the nationwide United Jewish Appeal, said such public displays set a good example.

Rossman had just returned from Tel Aviv, where he and other donors joined the welcoming ceremonies for 14,000 Jews who left Ethiopia only days before the fall of Addis Ababa.

He said that Israel offers a haven to Jewish refugees, but that American Jews have an obligation to help pay for it.

“You have a community that was apparently in a great deal of danger on Friday, and by Sunday we were able to bring them home,” he said. “No one stopped to say, ‘Can we afford to do this?’ And now it’s our responsibility.”

Across the country, he said, a network of about 15,000 young achievers will be in for some extra-heavy financial appeals as fund-raisers seek to exceed last year’s total of $450 million for Operation Exodus and $750 million for the Jewish community’s regular charities.

The Ethiopian operation, while dramatic in its urgency, pales in comparison to the flow of Jews from the Soviet Union, where 100,000 already hold exit visas and 900,000 more have said they want to join the 250,000 who have come to Israel since January, 1990, Dinitz said.

Their resettlement, too, will largely be paid for by proceeds from the Operation Exodus fund-raising campaign, which amounts to a doubling of the Jewish community’s fund-raising goal for 1991.

Another event, a fund-raising walk through eight miles of Westside streets, is scheduled for Sunday at 9 a.m., beginning and ending at Rancho Park, and 2,500 volunteers have been lined up for a telephone appeal on June 9.

At the Santa Monica event, pledges included $3,000 from a group of Soviet Army veterans living in West Hollywood, several of whom appeared with dozens of medals on their chests.

A boy of 13 promised $50, which was quickly brought up to the $1,000 minimum by another donor.

According to Jeannette Hartman, spokeswoman for the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, contributors will be asked to donate $75 million for Operation Exodus by the end of 1993, $33 million of which is already pledged or in hand.

At the same time, the community is seeking to raise $52 million for its regular campaign, which pays for social services, education and charity work in Los Angeles as well as Israel and other countries.