Why Does Kars4Kids Sends Most of Its Money to One Town In New Jersey?
The Charity Exists To Underpin a Deeply Conservative Social Order
1-877-Kars 4 Kids. You probably know the song, there’s a good chance anyone who listened to a radio at some point in the past 30 years is dreadfully familiar as well. Despite the pitch being ostensibly hard to disagree with, the incredibly awful jingle made Kars4Kids a charity everyone was kinda allowed to hate. What doesn't help with that reputation is learning that Kars4Kids doesn’t actually give to children who are particularly in need. That’s because the kids in question are being helped not because they are in need of charity, but because they are part of a religious group. Right on the Kars4Kids website, it clarifies this:
“Our all-encompassing programs give Jewish children and their families the support, resources, and guidance they need to develop into productive members of the community”
What the website doesn’t clarify is that these Jewish kids are almost exclusively in New Jersey. It is as much a regional organization as it is a religious one. An investigation by the Minnesota attorney general office found that Kars4Kids spent essentially none of its raised money from Minnesota in the state. Minnesota has a large Jewish community, one that I am familiar with many members of. But never did I hear about or see anything related to Kars4Kids when talking with friends or going to events hosted by Jewish community leaders.
Kars4Kids has done a few programs ‘helping’ the wider community. This mostly seems to manifest in handing out coats, basketballs, and developing an app that reminds you not to leave your child in a hot car (yes, really). Looking at their website, these programs are either in Newark, New York City, or Philadelphia. Conveniently, no more than a day trip from the headquarters in New Jersey. But this is all at best a half-assed attempt to argue a technicality. In reality, 92% of the organization’s cash is sent directly to another charity: Oorah. Located in Lakewood, New Jersey, and run by Kars4Kids founder Eliyohu Mintz, there is functionally no difference between the Kars4Kids and Oorah outside of paperwork and advertising.
Side note: I wouldn’t feel qualified to write this if it was just about Oorah. I’m not a member of the Jewish community, nor have I had any personal interactions with Jewish people that prompted me to write this. The truth is that Oorah forfeited the deniability of being a religious organization, both when it got most of its money from Kars4Kids, and when it didn’t even register as one for tax purposes. Oorah doesn’t even offer its services to Jewish people outside of the greater New York City and New Jersey metro area (less than 1% of the money stays in other states that donate). And besides, any charity that is going to subject us to that awful jingle would already be under intense legal scrutiny in a just system.
I have actually been passively familiar with Oorah for a few years. Like a large number of things in my life, Oorah originally came to my attention via an episode of the Cum Town podcast. At the time, I couldn’t help myself from looking more into the Jewish organization that had an anthropomorphic five dollar bill mascot. After additional inquiry, I learned that this wasn’t the result of a Der Stürmer writer brought to New Jersey during Operation Paperclip, it was connected to an actual organization.
Oorah itself is a Modern Orthodox Jewish charity that serves said community. Modern Orthodox Judaism is defined by maintaining Orthodox traditions while still interacting with the modern world as it is. This is different from Ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, Judaism, whose adherents self-segregate from broader society to maintain their beliefs as authentically as possible.
In terms of services offered, Oorah seems to focus mainly on the younger generation, although not exclusively. The focus makes sense, given that Orthodox families have more children on average than any other denomination in America, and the community has a general distrust of public institutions. They need a lot of Kars to pay 4 these Kids. It is for this reason that the charity exists supposedly, as a means to provide the Orthodox community with help raising children through programs like day camps.
I said supposedly because Oorah is unique even among shady charities for how strange it is. High rises, strip malls, and even a mixed-use development in Jerusalem, Kars4Kids is already known to have some assets that are tangentially related to kids at best. But when I looked at the tax returns for the two charities, a lot more than just buildings came up. I’ll give you a rundown of a couple interesting finds.
One property that Oorah owns is 985 Claire Drive, Lakewood New Jersey. According to tax records, Oorah acquired this property in 2015. What’s interesting is that the last time 985 Claire Drive was sold on the market was in 2009, according to RedFin. The property also isn’t a facility, it’s a single-family home. It’s not the only single-family home owned by Oorah either. 851 Morris, 624 Vine, 107, and 119 Rutgers, all bought in 2008, all but one off the market since then (107 sold in 2022 for $85k more than tax-assessed value). I don’t know what these are being used for, but the fact Google Street View doesn’t show any signs of these buildings being converted to any non-residential role makes me think there might be more going on.
Another revelation from the forms is how much profit this non-profit makes. 2021 revenue was $77,977,049, up 62.5% from the previous year while expenses of $28,251,610 represented a mere 7% rise. These numbers aren’t unprecedented (look at pretty much any college in the US), but raise questions. More specifically, it makes you wonder what the $34 million in cash is doing just sitting there. For that, I have at least a partial answer.
Oorah hosts a yearly charity auction that is live-streamed in a telethon format. During this telethon, Oorah gives out several prizes, many of them straight-up cash, in a format that they call an auction, but that is really just a raffle. Originally I was going to include my thoughts and summary of this telethon, but it ultimately constitutes a fairly small part of Oorah’s operation, so I spun that part off into a more light-hearted article you can read on my page.
The one part of the live stream I wanted to talk about was an advertisement for another Oorah organization that shows up about halfway through. Rebbetzins is a site that facilitates the traditional Orthodox Jewish ‘shidduch’, where young singles are matched with each other by members of the community. For a religious group that is strictly divided along gender lines and does not evangelize itself, the shidduch is a method for maintaining this tight social cohesion. In essence, the shidduch system is one of the only institutional forms of arranged marriage in the United States.
The shidduch is also a model that is in crisis. Creatively named ‘The Shidduch Crisis’, many in the Orthodox community fear that there is a decline in the number of marriages overall which is being spearheaded by a drop in Shidduch marriages. Looking into this, the conclusion I saw reached by observers was that a high dropout rate from the religion, pickiness by parents, and the generally dehumanizing nature of having your partner picked for you as technology tears down more social barriers. Men are also less willing to marry, which combines with the higher male tendency for leaving Orthodox Judaism to make women in the shidduch system more susceptible to being objectified both by potential partners and often the woman’s own parents trying to sell in a buyer's market.
Rebbetzins seeks to fix part of this crisis by providing a more streamlined and supportive Shidduch process to parents. In the promo played during the telethon, it is made clear that the purpose of Rebbetzins is to reinforce the shidduch system with their services. Despite a red background that brings to mind online dating services and romantic music, Rebbetzins is part of a deeply conservative tradition.
As I previously mentioned, the shidduch system does not favor women. More than just the demographic issues that make women outnumber men in the community, women who are married using the shidduch system are being placed firmly inside a deeply patriarchal community structure. The most damning example of this is the fact that Orthodox women are not allowed to seek a divorce, only their husbands can initiate that process. This can result in creative solutions where gangs of Orthodox men are hired on behalf of Orthodox women unsatisfied with their marriages to kidnap and “convince” the husbands who are refusing to grant a divorce.
Unfortunately, most Orthodox women aren’t able to hire roving gangs or the Soprano crime family. While studies on the topic in American Orthodox Jewish communities are rare, it was found that the Orthodox community in Israel had rates of domestic abuse that were far. A study from the University of Puget Sound noted the relationship between adherence and violence: “Domestic violence is harder to escape for more religious women because of their strict adherence to Halakha”.
Despite Oorah being more modern than other strains of Orthodox Judaism, the leadership still maintains a deeply conservative view towards marriage. While the stylish presentation and. Oorah founder Chaim Mintz said so himself in November of 2023, answering a question about the roles of men and women in a statement summarized by Oorah: “The man makes the decisions because he has the Torah knowledge to back him up”. Statements like this point to a phenomenon called “Haredization”, where Modern Orthodox communities become increasingly observant of traditional practices.
Lakewood, New Jersey where Oorah is based has spent the last 20 years growing into a religious boom town for Orthodox Jews. This growth has been on top of a high base level of poverty that, by some counts, is equal to that of Detroit. The Orthodox community is known for higher poverty rates and helping one another frequently, but this can’t sustain a growing community. Luckily, Oorah exists to promote the interests of Lakewood residents. By comparing the Lakewood city budget for 2021 with Oorah’s operating expenses from the same year, my math showed that Oorah spends the equivalent of 23.5% of the city budget on its own projects.
Oorah runs a rather ‘sophisticated’ operation for giving to its community. The Salvation Army Worldwide Office grants roughly 71% of its operating expenses to other organizations, and the Jewish Community Foundation Of Greater MetroWest New Jersey gives almost 85% of its operating expenses away. Oorah gives only 12.7% of its operating expenses away. Over $13 million of the $28 million in 2021 operating expenses went to salaries, miscellaneous payroll obligations, and office expenses. But given the aforementioned insular nature of Oorah, these are almost definitely all being paid to Lakewood residents. Paying so many salaries creates a sort of ouroboros of local investment that has coincided with the boom Lakewood has been experiencing in recent years.
Oorah bolsters the yeshiva system of private religious schools by making them a more appealing option for parents, either by making them cheaper or by otherwise enhancing their facilities. Meanwhile, the yeshiva push has put the Lakewood School District into a financial death spiral. By using legal loopholes, yeshivas have been able to demand bus services for 30,000 private school students from a district that educates only 5,000. This is a cost that a large organization like Oorah could feasibly take on, maybe by providing, I don’t know, cars for these kids to be driven to school in.
All this, the telethon, the shidduch, the buses, Fiveish, is being funded by the dollars of unaware people across the country donating to Kars4Kids. And that is my main problem with Oorah, the deception. If you took all of what I just described and told me it was funded by some billionaire donor, my tune would change, not because I would now approve of it anymore on a personal level, but because the externalities are contained to one person. But given the number of times you’ve heard that Kars4Kids jingle, we all know it's not contained to one person.
There are also plenty of Christian charities that misuse government funds and deceive the public, hell, there are so many that the idea of a pastor with a private jet has become a joke for half the country and a religious reality for a significant minority. When compared to the sheer scale of fraud in the name of Jesus Christ that has been committed in this country, Oorah’s tens of millions in revenue seem laughable. But those charities receive plenty of scrutiny for their actions, even if it doesn’t work all the time. So as long as the start of that infamous jingle is prompting thousands across the country to punch the power buttons on their car radios as fast as they can, Oorah is everybody’s problem.