“Don’t get hostile with me.” That was the “favorite expression” of Alan R. Crawford, according to his long-time friend and Milwaukee Jewish Federation colleague Betsy Green.
He had many occasions to use it, said Green, as at least some people would find themselves becoming defensive during a conversation with Crawford, a former MJF campaign chair (1983-84) and president (1986-87) who died on Jan. 28 at age 75.
“He was always probing you because he always wanted to learn,” said Green, one of Crawford’s successors as campaign chair and president. “Anyone who knew Alan knew that…. He studied until literally the day he died.”
“A lot of people thought he had an adversarial and challenging style of communication, but it wasn’t that at all,” said Richard Meyer, MJF executive vice president, who knew Crawford since 1984. Rather, Crawford was “interested in the person. Whatever issue [you were discussing], you knew you had his full and rapt attention.”
Moreover, this successful businessman who never went to college was “an obsessive reader, especially about politics and Jewish issues,” according to his son Carl Crawford of Brookline, Mass. His knowledge of Jewish community and business affairs “was unbelievable.”
He also, by all accounts, loved to share what he had learned. According to Meyer, Crawford helped create and was first national chair of a community fund-raising mentoring program for what was then the United Jewish Appeal (now United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization for North American Jewish federations). He also worked as consultant for the Jewish communities of Pittsburgh, Seattle and Miami, Meyer said.
“He loved fund-raising for what it could do to build and strengthen Jewish communities,” said Meyer. “He took as a personal challenge the opportunity to work with individual communities and help them strengthen the case for giving and to build the organizational infrastructure and the esprit de corps so people would want to give.”
Crawford did this in unofficial ways, as well. Carl Crawford said one of the discoveries the family made after his death was “the number of people he was mentoring” in the Jewish community and the business world. “He was extremely giving of his time to a lot of people.”
To Milwaukee businessman Howard Frankenthal, who met him in the late 1970s, Crawford was “a friend, a surrogate father and an advisor and mentor.” Though Crawford was “more my parents’ age in chronological years,” he was “very youthful in his thinking and attitude toward life.”
Crawford was born in Brookline and graduated from high school there. After service in the U.S. Navy, he went to Montreal and worked selling and distributing films for Warner Brothers, a job that involved travel through the Midwest and through which he became acquainted with Milwaukee.
After moving to Milwaukee in the early 1950s, he became first a real estate salesman, then a real estate developer. According to his son, developments he helped create included the low-income housing project Plymouth Hill; Manchester Village and Normandy Village; in addition to apartment buildings along Oakland Ave. He also founded Crawford Investment Company.
He had not been involved with the Jewish community until the 1970s. Then he went on a MJF mission to Israel and “something clicked,” said Meyer. He became “deeply passionate about meeting Jewish needs and strengthening the Jewish community.”
“Few people really cared as much as he did about the Jews of the entire world,” said Green.
A member of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, he also supported Congregation Beth Jehudah and studied with Rabbi Akiva Freilich, director of the Ohr HaTorah Jewish Heritage Center, according to his son.
In addition to son Carl (Hara Levy) Crawford, he is survived by daughter Elizabeth (Scott Winkler) Crawford of Milwaukee; sons David Crawford of Chicago and Eric Crawford of The Hague, Netherlands; and two grandchildren.
Rabbi Michel Twerski officiated at the funeral on Jan. 30. Burial was in Greenwood Cemetery.
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