Alan Hoffman: Immigration in the future will be out of 'choice'

The Jewish Agency's recently publicized shift in priorities - putting Jewish identity building ahead of immigration to Israel - does not mean the agency is abandoning its traditional role, according to incoming director-general Alan Hoffmann. While slowly revising its agenda toward a stronger focus on educational programs and initiatives connecting world Jewry with Israel, the organization's final goal ultimately remains to promote aliyah, he asserted.

"Even with the new paradigm, the Jewish Agency is creating aliyah," Hoffmann, 64, said Monday in his first newspaper interview since taking over the position last week. "The aliyah of the future is aliyah of choice from the West. But aliyah of choice will only come about if you cultivate the tree. The question of picking the fruit from the tree is only the very last stage in the process," added Hoffmann, who until last week headed the agency's education department, explaining that the promotion of Jewish identity is likely to inspire immigration to Israel.

Throughout his life, Hoffmann has been involved in Jewish education. Born in Johannesburg, he was active in Habonim and soon became the youth movement's national secretary-general. Later, he spent a few years at Harvard's education school and directed the Young Judaea Year Course program for Diaspora high-school graduates.

The appointment to director-general of Hoffmann, a senior educator - instead of a more aliyah-oriented candidate, such as Eli Cohen, the director of the agency's aliyah department - appeared to underline JAFI chairman Natan Sharansky's resolve to fundamentally refocus the agency's priorities. Sharansky announced last month the organization's main priority would no longer be bringing more Jews to Israel but to help preserve Jewish identity and foster Jewish "peoplehood" worldwide.

With $100.6 million, the agency's 2010 budget for aliyah is still higher than the education department's $94.3 million. Hoffmann shied away from averring that the agency would alter this balance next year. However, he said he found it difficult to imagine "that one can develop a new strategic direction without also changing the weighting of the priorities." He noted, "It will be a gradual change, which will take some time."

One of the ways in which the agency seeks to promote aliyah is by bringing more young Jews to Israel on programs like Taglit-Birthright Israel, Masa and "many programs yet to be invented," Hoffmann added. Birthright offers young Diaspora Jews free 10-day Israel trips and Masa, a joint program of the agency and the Israeli government, brings them here on long-term programs for study and volunteering.

Hoffmann says he aims to bring one out of every two young Jews to Israel each year on short-term programs and one out of four on long-term programs. "Out of this will come people who of their free will make the decision whether to connect their lives to the Jewish state or to live full Jewish lives outside Israel," he says.

No Soviet takeover

Hoffmann, who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Nadia and their four children, also addressed whispers among part of the agency's leadership and discussed in the press that Jews from the former Soviet Union are slowly taking over the organization. Besides Sharansky, two Russian speakers lately assumed influential positions: the Ukraine-born Misha Galperin, who last week filled a newly created senior post in the agency's U.S. headquarters; and Leonid Nevzlin, a philanthropist and Jewish Agency board member who commutes between New York and Tel Aviv.

"That's a total fallacy," Hoffmann retorted. "On the entire Jewish Agency board of governors there is a very small sprinkling of Russian-born leaders, in my opinion in no relation to" the important role they play in the Jewish world today, he said. "We are finally beginning to reap the reward of probably the most important influx of talent and content into the Jewish people of the last 50 years."

While it was "natural" that American-Jewish leaders are worried about the new kid on the block no one ever wondered why Russian Jews seemed to take over the classical music or the theater scene in Israel or why 25 percent of combat soldiers come from Russian speaking families, he said. "This is a revolution in Jewish life."