Some 70 years ago, as Doris Blum tells it, a group of young Jewish women in San Francisco got together to form a social club. They called the group Theta Delta Xi, for a reason none of the current members can explain.
“It’s supposed to mean friendship in the Greek alphabet, but I’m not sure of that because I’m not very good at the Greek alphabet,” says Blum, 92, one of the oldest members.
“It’s a silly moniker, but it’s ours” says Elaine Lowenthal, the president, who joined in later years. “We’re affiliated with nobody. It’s just us.”
Affiliated or not, the group of about 28 women has been meeting at least monthly since the Depression years. And while it started as a friendship group, today Theta Delta Xi has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit Jewish and non-Jewish causes in the Bay Area, in Israel and elsewhere. The focus has always been on youth and people with disabilities.
Among the beneficiaries: S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services; the campership fund of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco; Etgarim, a disabled children’s and youth program in Israel; Ronald McDonald House; the National Association for the Visually Handicapped; and the UCSF Art for Recovery program.
Over the years, the group has been honored by the S.F.-based JFCS. Blum is fond of repeating an exchange she had with the executive director, Anita Friedman. When Blum mentioned the small size of the sorority, she said Friedman told her, “Yes, you’re a small group, but you do more good than some of the very large groups.”
Theta Delta Xi is a hybrid — neither a traditional sorority nor a major Jewish philanthropy on the order of Hadassah. Currently, the age ranges from the 90s to the 50s. But that’s not how things were back in the early ’30s.
“I was around 22 or 23 years old when I joined,” says Blum. “It was a group of just-out-of-school young women. We joined for social things. You had girlfriends, girlfriends had brothers who weren’t married.” The sorority, she said, started originally in Oakland and then established chapters in San Francisco and Sacramento, but only the San Francisco group survived.
“As time went on,” according to Blum, the women “married, had families, the war came along. We didn’t need it for social reasons anymore. We changed [the group] to do something worthwhile — baskets for new arrivals and people who couldn’t afford food for Passover… and that got us started into philanthropy.
“We decided we needed to make money, so we gave card parties in each other’s home,” charging admission. While the funds “kept growing, we never changed our principles, keeping it a limited group, with rarely more than 25 members.”
Current members propose new members, but there’s no rush week, pledging or blackballing. “Women are invited to join — not that there’s any secrecy,” Blum says. “We keep the mix congenial and compatible.”
At 93, Betty Rosenthal, also of San Francisco, is the oldest member. Although she wasn’t one of the original members, she joined Theta Delta Xi sometime before 1948, when the group was already involved in philanthropy.
“The one thing we never did was actually give money, ” she says. “We always got wish lists of things people needed and we bought it and gave it to them.”
Adds Lowenthal: “Whenever we give money, it’s designated for a specific purpose. We prefer not to give money, but will give camperships. We prefer to buy the books, buy the machine.”
Among the items the group gives away are Safeway gift certificates to homeless teens at the Larkin Street Youth Services, a San Francisco organization that works to “move youth beyond the street.” While delivering the certificates, Lowenthal began talking to a young man there.
“He told me he had been on the streets for three years, and while he was on the streets, he wasn’t ready to come in [to the center], but [nonetheless] got the certificate for foods,” she says. “Now he’s head of a department at Larkin Street. He showed me pictures of his wife and family and their Christmas tree. That’s what I get out of it. When you do things like that and know it’s accomplishing something, that’s really terrific.”
In addition to hosting one large fund-raiser a year, the group has published three cookbooks, including one by Abigail Van Buren, and the other two with large type (which makes them easy to use in the kitchen), printed by the National Association for the Visually Handicapped, one of the organizations Theta Delta Xi has supported over the years.
But beyond tzedakah, “what I get out of [the group] is a wonderful group of friends,” says Lowenthal, who describes herself as “in the middle,” in terms of the group’s age span.
Rosenthal, the oldest member, chuckles. “My daughter said to me one day, ‘Are you taking new members. I said, ‘Yes, we have nice young members.'” Her daughter replied, “That’s great. How old are they?”
“In their 70s,” Rosenthal said. “We just took a young lady who was in one of my Girl Scout troops.”
In actuality, the group has about five members in their 50s, including Michelle Ackerman of San Francisco, who was introduced by another friend, Joanne Levy.
“We’re the fifty-somethings,” she says. “If you keep inviting new people into the group and they like it and they bring in new friends, then it grows instead of dies. They’re smart. These women are very smart.”
What makes the group unique is that “they fund under-funded groups. They go out of their way to find groups that are under the radar. For me it’s a different Jewish group,” says Ackerman, who calls Theta Delta Xi “my different sisterhood.”
“They are very professional women who come from an era when women weren’t professionals. They bring tremendous entertaining skills. They know how to put on a benefit better than any professional development department. They’re as good as the pros.”