The dog days of summer often inspire people to find a cool spot and do nothing, but that’s not the case for the former chief executive and chairman of Bear Stearns, Alan “Ace” Greenberg and his wife, Kathy, an attorney.

The Greenbergs have donated $5 million to the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York to create a scholarship fund to send hundreds of impoverished children to day- and sleep-away summer camps.

This donation is sizable for a camp scholarship but small compared to the money the Greenbergs have helped raise for UJA-Federation. The agency’s Wall Street Dinner, for which Mr. Greenberg served as chairman last year, raised more than $20 million.

“If we can help some kids get a little joy out of the summer, it makes us feel good,” Mr. Greenberg said yesterday in a telephone interview from his office at Bear Stearns, where he serves as the chairman of the executive committee and where he established a rule requiring employees to make charitable contributions.

Mrs. Greenberg is the founder of the New York Legal Assistance Group and the chairwoman of the board of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

The donation will help send children to more than 17 camp programs in New York City, Westchester County, and Long Island that serve more than 22,000 campers. Mr. Greenberg attended Camp Wakonda in Missouri, where, he said, he did not pick up any skills that have helped him in business.

Rather, it is Mr. Greenberg’s long career on Wall Street that seems to have prepared him for his firm’s rough summer. Over the weekend, a co-president of the firm, Warren Spector, resigned in the wake of the June collapses of two hedge funds’ the firm ran. Investors in the collapsed funds have brought lawsuits against Bear Stearns, and the hedge funds implosion also is being blamed for the stock market’s recent tumble.

“This comes with the territory, to have problems occasionally,” Mr. Greenberg said of his firm’s difficulties. “We’ll work through this.”