Proposal · September 2026
What this site proposes, and what it needs from you.
Everything here is a working concept for a new zeitoun-memorial.org, built from the current site's own words and photographs, the foundation's public record, and two briefing documents prepared this month. Nothing on it is the foundation's live site, and nothing on it commits the foundation to anything.
Why
The current site tells the story. It does not make the ask.
The existing single page opens with the apparition and spends roughly its first thousand words there; the project, the place and the amount surface around section eight of thirteen. Donate and Support Our Cause both lead to one one-time PayPal button. There is no monthly giving, no email capture, no EIN, no named leadership, no phone number, no progress to date, and six of the eight archive images still carry lorem ipsum captions. A visitor who arrives from a shared link leaves knowing about a miracle, not about a building they could help fund.
The full review, with thirteen findings ranked by damage per hour of work to fix, is the first of two briefings: The website review →
The second explains something that changes what the site must do: no grant program identified will pay to construct this building, so the $10 million has to come from individuals and parishes — steadily, and in a small number of large gifts. The funding playbook →
What changed
Seven pages instead of one, with the ask first.
| Page | Purpose | Answers the review's finding |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Names the project, the place and the ask in the first screen. Progress strip. One primary action, one secondary. | 02 hero · 05 progress · 03 the ask |
| The Apparition | The full account, sourced; the archive with real captions; a call for photographs and testimony. | 01 captions · 10 archive |
| Heritage | A hub over three pages: what Egypt gave the world, how the Copts came to America, and the Egyptians whose work the world uses. | — |
| Egypt | Five thousand years, with a corrections note naming the famous claims that did not survive checking. | — |
| Coming to America | Six waves of migration, why medicine, the women who sold their gold in Jersey City, and the honest paragraph on Zeitoun and the leaving. | — |
| Renowned Egyptians | Four Nobel laureates, Boutros-Ghali, Sir Magdi Yacoub, and eleven more. Christian and Muslim, on purpose. | — |
| The Cultural Center | The building that holds the museum, its nine galleries, and what it holds besides galleries. | — |
| The Project | The building, the museum, the site with facts, five funded phases instead of one six-zero number. | 05 progress · 08 structure |
| The Foundation | Mission, the blessing inline, leadership by name, twelve years of financials from the public filings, and a verification block. | 06 trust · 07 metadata |
| Updates | Dated posts, newest first. The page that proves the project is alive. | 05 progress |
| Ways to Give | Monthly first; an amount ladder; named opportunities; check, stock, DAF, IRA, bequest; employer matching; a person to call for major gifts. | 03 the ask |
| Contact | Email, phone, post, a form with a privacy line and a reply expectation, and how to visit the land. | 11 contact · 06 trust |
| Disclosures · Privacy | The New Jersey solicitation statement verbatim; EIN and registration; deductibility, receipts, refunds; a plain privacy policy. | 06 trust |
Also, on every page
- A footer with the legal name, EIN, registration, the required NJ disclosure, and links to the filings.
- An email-updates box — the first list the foundation will have had.
- Title, description and Open Graph tags, so a link shared in a parish WhatsApp group or Facebook post shows a picture and a summary instead of a bare URL.
- Schema.org NGO markup with the EIN.
- One primary "Give" action in the header.
- Headings in sentence case; copy that says will, not hope to.
What is still to supply
Everything marked like this is yours to supply.
The photographs and words of the current site are all in use. What remains is what only the foundation has, and none of it is hard.
Photographs
The current site's eleven photographs are all used — the 1968 apparition photograph carries the home page, the giving page and the link preview. Still wanted, in order of value:
- The renderings and as-built drawings from the firm in Egypt, and the redrawn plans — the campaign's most persuasive asset, currently unseen. The one remaining drawn panel, on the Project page, is where they go.
- A dated photograph of the Route 206 property, ideally with people in it.
- The letter of blessing, photographed flat and legible, with a transcription and translation — in place of the PDF link.
- The photograph of Fr. Antonious with Pope Tawadros II at full size, for the Foundation page.
- Sources and dates for three archive images marked on the Apparition page.
- The list of renowned Egyptians on the heritage pages: confirm each entry and extend it. It names real people, several of them living, so the foundation should own it. The Coptic Medical Association of North America and the archdiocese are the right places to ask, because their names come with permission attached.
- A specialist's sign-off on the derivation of Aigyptos from Ḥwt-ka-Ptaḥ. It is the museum's signature claim and deserves a Coptic linguist, not a website.
- The list of renowned Copts on the Heritage page: confirm each entry, and extend it — physicians, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, public servants. It names real people, so the foundation should own it.
Facts
- The PO box and zip code; a phone number and who answers it; the email address to publish.
- Officers' names and roles, matching the latest Form 990-PF, with one line each.
- A transcription and translation of the letter of blessing.
- Costs for the steps before construction — site plan, engineering, approvals — if the foundation wishes to publish them.
- Amounts and counts for the named opportunities.
- The name of the Egyptian architectural firm and when the survey was done.
- The property's street address, for navigation.
- Whether recurring donations are enabled on the PayPal account, and whether the foundation is registered on Benevity, YourCause and CyberGrants.
- The Candid/GuideStar profile link, once claimed.
On the framing
The foundation is a cultural organization, not a religious one, and the site now says so — on the Foundation page, in the disclosures, and in the footer — and describes the replica as the centrepiece of a museum and heritage institution rather than as a church with a museum inside it. The apparition is presented as a documented historical event. This matters for more than tone: the funding playbook found every grant door closed to religious purposes, and a cultural museum is a different applicant.
Before launch, someone qualified should read two things
The deductibility paragraph, because the foundation files Form 990-PF and the limits on a donor's deduction depend on that classification — and the playbook recommends resolving the classification itself. And the apparition narrative, by someone from the foundation or the diocese, for anything they would put differently. The historical facts there are drawn from the standard published accounts, and the foundation's own archive may correct or enrich them.
Decisions
Twelve things only the foundation can decide.
Each is live on the site now, built the way the research recommended, and each is marked on its own page with a dashed underline. Collect these into one email.
| Decision | Built as |
|---|---|
| The internal split of the $10 million | Four lines: $5M church, $4M Cultural Center, $600K approvals, $400K opening. The alternative is a flat $5M + $5M. |
| How the progress meter is framed | "$991,000 raised and held, including the Hillsborough land." Honest about comparing assets to a construction goal. |
| The rationale for the increase | Written out on the Project page, and it must become the foundation's own words before it ships. |
| Does the site include Hypatia? | Yes, on the Egypt page, with the Dzielska framing. Omitting her is defensible; pretending she did not exist is not. |
| Does the Sadat card carry the Pope Shenouda paragraph? | Yes, on the renowned page. All or nothing — a softened version is worse than either. |
| An oral history studio in the Cultural Center? | Yes, on the Cultural Center page and as a $50,000 naming opportunity. Cheap, urgent, finite. |
| "21 Coptic Martyrs" or "20 Copts and one Ghanaian"? | The site currently says "the twenty-one men taken in Libya." Pick one and use it everywhere. |
| The named-opportunity amounts | Fourteen kinds, $5.7 million if every one is taken. Every line needs the architect. |
| The gift table | Published on the giving page. Conventional for this goal; a campaign counsel may want a different shape. |
| Preset gift amounts and preselection | $25 · $50 · $100 · $250 · $500 · $1,000, with $100 preselected. Preselection materially changes the average gift. |
| Two distances | Jersey City to Hillsborough, and the memorial parcel to St. Mary & St. Athanasius. Measure both; a local visitor will know. |
| The phone number | Currently off the site rather than shown empty. Give the foundation a number and a name, or leave it off. |
Not in this proposal
Deliberately left for the live build.
- Form delivery. The contact and subscribe forms are drawn, not wired. On launch they post to a small handler that emails the foundation and adds subscribers to a list.
- An Arabic version of the home page and the giving page, which the audience likely warrants.
- A map of the site, and a proper street address.
- Analytics, if wanted, named in the privacy policy.
- Search-engine indexing. This proposal carries noindex on every page. The live site would not.
Four things no amount of web research can supply, and the foundation should commission them: an oral history program, starting now, because nothing about this parish or this corridor exists in any public source and it lives only in the memory of people in their seventies and eighties; the St. Mark's Jersey City parish archive, to confirm the jewelry account and settle who celebrated the first liturgy; the scholarship of Michael Akladios, the leading historian of exactly this subject, whose two key papers sit behind university paywalls; and the etymology, checked by a Coptic linguist.
The proposal is hosted at zeitoun.whatwouldthesaintssay.com as a working concept. If the foundation adopts it, it moves to zeitoun-memorial.org unchanged — it is plain HTML with no dependencies.