Smoke-filled hotel and country-club dining rooms with middle-aged men puffing on cigars.

That is my main memory of the countless events I covered during my early career as editor of the weekly Jewish newspaper in my Buffalo hometown. The annual dinners were the social and economic highlights of the city’s Jewish Federation, and of the Israel Bonds office.

Every year I sat in the stuffy rooms, taking notes and photographs, while the well-heeled men – it was usually men – who sustained the Jewish community’s philanthropic endeavors puffed away, standing at their tables to announce that year’s multi-figure donation. As a working reporter, I was in no financial position to add to the evening’s total.

But I admired, and dutifully reported on, the gatherings that brought the contributors to the Greater Buffalo’s Jewish community together, and sustained wider Jewish continuity.

During the years I grew up and later worked as a journalist in Buffalo, those two heavyweight Jewish organizations – the Jewish Federation, and Israel Bonds – dominated the communal skyline. They shared local prominence and prestige, raising money for local (in addition to overseas) Jewish needs, and for Medinat Israel. Both sponsored year-round P.R.- and fund-raising activities, were the subjects of favorable coverage in the general and Jewish media, and were the area’s most-recognized Jewish organizations. In the eyes of most Buffalo Jews, both institutions were equally significant.

After moving to New York City some four decades ago, and covering Jewish affairs as a staff writer on the Jewish Week newspaper, I learned that Israel Bonds assumed a less-prominent – but no-less vital – place in the firmament of the galaxy of Jewish organizations based in the Big Apple. Apparently, unlike in a smaller city like Buffalo, the activities of the single-minded Israel Bonds organization were typically in the shadow of a behemoth umbrella organization that has operated since 1986 as UJA-Federation (a merger of the separate United Jewish Appeal and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies), which coordinates a panoply of worthy causes and administers a wide range of educational, cultural and social service programs.

Both are wonderful institutions. While I would write a modest chai check regularly to UJA-Federation, I considered an Israel Bonds purchase out of range for my limited tzedakah (or investment) capabilities.

But both were legitimate recipients of a........

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