Lincoln Park Resident Ariel Weiss Wins Prestigious Jewish Federation Award

Ariel Zipkin Weiss, 30, of Lincoln Park, received the 26th annual Samuel A. Goldsmith Award at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago’s 114th Annual Meeting, which took place Sept. 11.

The Goldsmith award is given to exceptional young professionals who have shown outstanding performance in their work at a Jewish agency in the Chicago area.

Weiss was recently promoted to Director of Donor Engagement at JUF, where she formerly served as Director of YLD. During her tenure, she has launched dozens of new programs and initiatives. A recent YLD event that Weiss organized, the Blue and White Bar Night, attracted over 800 people last spring – an 80 percent increase over the previous year. She has also served as the lead professional for the past three Big Event Fundraisers, which were enormously successful and broke both fundraising and attendance records.

In her remarks, Weiss credited her work at JUF for providing her with a sense of identity, community, and a place to put her passion for tikkun olam to work.

“What the Federation does in Chicago affects the entire world,” she said. “I have seen how tenant support prevents homelessness; how Holocaust survivors have a safety net to live out their lives with dignity; how a hungry mother receives food assistance for her family. In Ukraine, I visited a summer camp where Jewish life thrived. This is Jewish revitalization at its best, and it is taking place all over the world – in struggling Jewish communities, in places where Hitler committed to Jewish destruction, in places where pogroms were prominent. The impact of what we do spans the globe, and I am privileged to play a small role in it.”

The Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation is one of the largest nonprofit social welfare institutions in Illinois. The organization funds a vital network of agencies that act upon core Jewish values, including caring for people in need and sustaining the Jewish community.

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