Industry leader says Jews should speak up about Iran

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—When Joseph Kanfer, the father of Purell hand sanitizers, focuses this week on Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches to AIPAC and to Congress, he will do so “because I think it is necessary for our very survival but my love is Jewish education.”

Kanfer, whose GOJO manufacturing company is based in Akron, Ohio, was in San Diego Friday, Feb. 27 and Saturday, Feb. 28, to attend the 70^th anniversary celebration and sales conference of Waxie Sanitary Supply, a major western regional distributor of janitorial and sanitary cleaning products.  He was honored at the Sheraton Harbor Island Hotel conference as “vendor of the year” by the San Diego-based company, which is owned by brothers Charles and David Wax.

Like Kanfer, the two Wax brothers are also active in the Jewish community, and in appreciation for the GOJO-Waxie relationship, Kanfer made financial contributions to each brother’s favorite Jewish charity.  For Charles it was to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, while for David, a former president of the Lawrence Family JCC, Kanfer’s check went to the national Jewish Community Center Association.

During a break in the proceedings, I had the opportunity to interview Kanfer, who is a former chair of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), as well as a former chair of the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA).  He also has been a member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and is active in Democratic party politics in Ohio where he chaired the election campaign of U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.

Concerning Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to a Joint Session of Congress on Tuesday, March 3, Kanfer said: “Unfortunately, I think it has been politicized and I happen to agree that we were quiet as Jews in World War II and we weren’t as loud as we might have been.  I think that is a legacy that we face today.  To say that we should be quiet and play nice is ridiculous and I am quite offended by those who would suggest that Israel should be treated differently because it made a faux pas – even if we agree that it was a faux pas of protocol.  I break protocol all the time with my wife, but that doesn’t mean that she is going to kick me out of the house.”

On the issue of Netanyahu’s speech – Iran’s nuclear ambitions – Kanfer said “if the President settles for allowing Iran to have nuclear power in ten years, I think he has done the world a great disservice. I don’t think he knows that.  I don’t think he has ill will toward Israel. I think he is purely naïve.  I don’t even think it is politically motivated.  I just think he doesn’t know how the world works.  I think it is unfortunate.  He’d have been a much better president 20 years later.”   Iran, in Kanfer’s view, doesn’t need nuclear power, “they have oil power and they need to prove their bonafides as a citizen of the world before they get nuclear power.  If we let anyone get nuclear power who wants it, we will have a very scary world.”

Asked if he expected the rift between Obama and Netanyahu to be healed in the near future, he responded “I am less worried about that than I am about American isolationism.  My biggest fear is that America will say ‘you know what, we have been in Iraq, we have been in all these places, and we can’t win, so let’s just take care of our own.’  I think that is a recipe for disaster, and that is my biggest worry.  Remember what it was like in 1940.  We (the U.S.) had no Army, we were totally an isolationist country.  We can blame FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt), and I don’t know where this stands, for not being more supportive of the Jews (during the Holocaust), but he faced an isolationist America, and I don’t want to see that happen again.  I think Israel would suffer in that regard.”

Following Netanyahu’s congressional speech, Kanfer said he plans to escort some “influential” non-Jews on a seven-day private visit to Israel so that they can get a feeling for that country.  He did not identify his guests, but said that escorting people to Israel is “one of the ways I can contribute in a far bigger way than any dollars I can give to help build an understanding of Israel.”  After his guests return to the United States, he said, he will stay there to do some business.  He owns a company in Netanya that serves as an incubator for small companies in the medical technology field.

Arranging trips to Israel is the focus of another of Kanfer’s projects. He recently became chairman “of a new non-profit called Honeymoon Israel.  We are sending young couples to Israel.  You are familiar with Taglit/ Birthright Israel.  This is a program for young couples, after marriage and before children, and often intermarried.  We are sending the first cohorts from Phoenix and Los Angeles.  When we came to Los Angeles, we had 130 couples for 20 slots.  You know what they were hungry for?  Connection, belonging, community… I believe that Judaism always stood for community, whether it is a minyan that we pray in, or even in the concept of chosenness, which is a complicated topic.  In the Torah, it says God says you should take care of the widow and the orphan and if you don’t bad things will happen.”  Kanfer noted that the command to take care of the widow and orphan is made (in Hebrew)  to a singular “you” but the consequences will be borne by a collective “you.”

The Lippman-Kanfer Family Foundation has two separate funds, one for Jewish projects; the other for social action projects.  Kanfer is able to donate money through the foundations partly because of the phenomenal success of Purell, the hand sanitizer that is ubiquitous in hospitals and medical offices and is gradually coming into regular use in other industries.

I asked Kanfer how Purell was invented, and he said the alcohol-based hand sanitizer resulted from an inquiry made to him by a fast food restaurant chain he declined to identify that was worried about the frequency with which its employees were able to wash their hands.

“We brainstormed and came up with the idea, but the problem was that the alcohol was a pretty nasty commodity back then, and so it took us a couple of years in the lab to formulate around it to make it skin-friendly.  It was quite complicated in terms of formulation of the process (which involved) very complicated chemistry.  But we ended up making a nice product, and then when we tried to sell it nobody bought it, because at first nobody understood what it was.”

“People would say, ‘what do I do with this?  My people wash their hands.’ We would say, ‘No they don’t!  They are supposed to wash between every patient contact, that is 65-75 times a day.  It takes a minute and a half to wash and dry; that is an hour and a half to two hours (per day) to do that.  Do they do that?’”

“People don’t want to admit what they don’t do,” Kanfer continued.  “It wasn’t that they were bad people; it was simply that the paradigm in your mind was that we wash.  The breakthrough came with a guy named John Boyce of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.  Brigham and Women’s Hospital had an outbreak and he wanted to put Purell in.  His board said no.  If you put it in (they said), people won’t wash.  He eventually persuaded them to try it in a couple of wards and he solved the infection problem.  But here’s the magic.  What happened to the hand washing?  It increased.  So think about this: the more Purell you use, the more people wash.”

“Think about how we behave as people,” he said.  “When we are thinking about something we do more of it.  If we are thinking about health all the time then we are eating well and exercising, so the more Purell they used, the more they washed.”

Besides in hospitals, hand sanitizers have made inroads into schools, said Kanfer.  There’s actually a financial incentive for their introduction in California, where the state pays $31.50 per day per student to school districts.  If hand sanitizing can reduce absenteeism among students by two days per school year, that’s a gain of $63 per student to the school district, or $53 net after one deducts the $10 it costs to buy and administer the Purell.

Some schools have the teacher standing at the door, squirting Purell into the children’s hands as they return from recess; others have a hand sanitizing program in association with lunch times or with bathroom breaks.

What about transportation? I asked.  Purell stations are common on cruise ships, but not on airplanes.

He responded that airplanes are a logical place to have hand sanitizers because “if you think about transmission (of germs), hands are the number one vehicle.  Eighty percent of the transmission is through hands and in transportation, everyone is touching everything.”  If people on long cruises get sick, they know that they probably got the infection on the ship, but airplane transportation “is so transient, you never put two and two together, so you get sick but you never know from where.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  Your signed comment (first and last name) may be posted in the space provided below or sent to donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com