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Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation

The Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation based in Weston MA, through which the Egermans donate to several Zionist organizations.

Support for Israel

The Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation has made substantial donations to organizations which support Israel and promote the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland. These include:

In addition to its direct donations to Zionist organizations, the Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation donated a total of $1,235,500 to Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) from FY01-FY15. Combined Jewish Philanthropies is a Donor Advised Fund, which functions as a recipient of large sums of money from wealthy individuals, money which CJP then channels to those wealthy donors' desired recipient organizations as donations from CJP, without the necessity of public transparency that the donation came from the specific donor. In this way, CJP allows wealthy individuals to financially support organizations without the public necessarily knowing that they are doing so, or knowing the extent to which they are doing so.

Along with their foundation’s donations, Paul and Joanne Egerman have held numerous leadership positions within Zionist organizations. Paul Egerman is the North American Vice President of the liberal Zionist organization The New Israel Fund, a former member of the Advisory Council and the Boston Leadership Council of the liberal Zionist organization J Street, as well as a former board member of Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP). Joanne Egerman has served on the board of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in New York.

Other Influences in the Boston Area 

The Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation also donates to several notable Boston Area educational, medical, and science institutions, some of which support Zionism and/or other forms of racism and are included on our map. These include:

Along with his foundation's donations to these Boston area institutions, Paul Egerman is currently the vice-chairman of the Boston Museum of Science.

Private Foundations: Redirecting Resources from the Tax-Base to the Preferred Charities of the Wealthy

Assets held within a private foundation, as well as gains on those assets, face considerably less tax liability than assets held as personal wealth. Moreover, private foundations enable wealthy individuals to use tax write-offs to reduce the taxes they have pay on all of their assets, including assets held outside of their foundations as personal wealth. Such tax-evasion is perfectly legal, on the condition that a foundation's disbursements (donations + expenses) in a given fiscal year equal at least 5% of the fair market value of that foundation's total assets from the end of the previous fiscal year. The Egerman Family Charitable Foundation's tax filings from recent years show total annual disbursements of assets which only marginally exceed this federally mandated 5% minimum. In FY19, for example, the Egerman Family Charitable Foundation disbursed $1,387,750 of its assets, 8.1% of the $17,028,167 fair market value of the Foundation's assets at the end of FY18. In FY18, the Egerman Family Charitable Foundation disbursed $1,343,026 of its assets, 7.0% of the $19,280,216 fair market value of the Foundation's assets at the end of FY17.

Moreover, because the Egerman Family Charitable Foundation's assets are invested in corporate stocks, assets within the Foundation have in recent years yielded annual gains close to or exceeding the amount of money the  foundation has disbursed in donations and expenses. In FY19, for example, assets within the Egerman Family Charitable Foundation produced revenues from interest, dividends, along with gains from asset sales totaling $3,259,192, far exceeding of the $1,387,750 that the Foundation disbursed in donations and expenses that year. In FY18, assets within the Egerman Family Charitable Foundation produced revenues from interest, dividends, along with gains from asset sales totaling $898,135, just shy of the $1,343,026 that the Foundation disbursed in donations and expenses that year. As noted above, such gains on assets held within a private foundation face considerably less tax liability than gains on assets held as personal wealth. 

Rather than benevolent ventures through which wealthy individuals give away their money for the public good, private foundations should be understood as strategic financial maneuvers through which the wealthy reduce the taxes they have to pay into public budgets in exchange for committing to donate a portion of the (under-taxed) wealth held in their foundations to their preferred charitable causes. Paul and Joanne Egerman use the Egerman Family Charitable Foundation as a tax-free stock portfolio for over $24 million of their family's wealth, while funneling derivative income from these stocks into organizations and institutions supporting Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland.

77 Westcliff Rd., Weston, MA 02493

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