One people, many pockets - Haaretz

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Thu., November 22, 2007 Kislev 12, 5768

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One people, many pockets

By Shmuel Rosner

Tags: Howard Rieger, Jewish world

NASHVILLE - The writing of the latest No. 1 country music hit - Dierks Bentley's "Free and Easy" - was completed here, in Nashville, as are many of America's greatest country songs. "I could make a million or wind up broke / Free and easy down the road I go," Bentley warbles. "Ain't no tellin' where the wind might blow / Free and easy down the road I go." On Monday evening, thousands of Jewish activists came to the city's iconic Grand Ole Opry. They were in town for the annual meeting of the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities of North America, held at a hotel that pushes the notion of a good time past the bounds of the ludicrous. After two days of GA meetings and discussions, they were happy activists, if a bit tired. You could tell by the low intensity of the applause. Or, maybe country just isn't their kind of music.

That, for example, was the case with Howard Rieger, the president and CEO of United Jewish Communities (UJC), the umbrella organization that represents 155 North American Jewish federations and 400 independent communities. His position brought him to the meeting for an obligatory appearance. In fact, he, like the protagonist of Bentley's song, is busy trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing. No one can say. The organization he heads has already made its million - its billions, actually. Now his role is to make sure it doesn't go broke.

Catastrophes

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It was a bit of an odd annual gathering, seemingly without a point. Last year, in Los Angeles, the Jews of America focused on Israel's situation after the Second Lebanon War. Two years ago, they raised money to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Catastrophes make the activist's job easier, more obvious. In their absence, he is seen for what he is: a panhandler seeking to increase the capital of the institution that sent him here.

Here, in a simplistic nutshell, is the challenge that the Jewish federations are coping with: The number of donors is falling, the money being donated is dwindling, the young people are kicking the old carcass - and small, agile, wily organizations are eating away at it from all sides, competing for attention, wealth and credit. These groups are engaged in exciting new projects, in paving alternative paths of Jewishness, and the federations are stuck with the accursed responsibility of looking after elderly, poor and sick Jews. Necessary tasks, for which it is hard to raise money.

By its nature, the UJC - the largest and certainly the richest Jewish organization in the world - is a convenient target for criticism. It is the monster of the petrified, bureaucracy-ridden, aging, conservative, out-of-touch Jewish establishment. A few years have passed since its leaders grasped this fact of life, and for quite some time they have been trying to shake off the image, to get their act together again. But young people are, as everyone knows, short-tempered, sometimes also shortsighted. In the meantime, it's doubtful that they have noticed the change, and even if they have, it's far from certain that it was sufficient from their point of view. Many of them believe that what's needed is not change, but revolution. Some have lost faith in this institution. Its time has passed, they say.

Young Jews are giving less to the federations that comprise the UJC and more to other Jewish organizations that they find more attractive. They want to control the money they donate, to decide where every dollar ends up going, and are unwilling to toe the line of an oppressive, sometimes artificial "consensus." They are also giving less to "Jewish" causes and more to "general" ones. This is part of the process of fragmentation of American Jewish society and its members' integration into the exuberant American commonalty. In the absence of a unifying external threat, every Jew is looking for his or her own distinctive, private path to self-fulfillment.

The federations will fight this process by streamlining and image-changing, making use of the two weapons at their disposal: the argument for unity and the power of economic resources. Only we, they say, represent the entire Jewish public, as opposed to fragments of it. "One people, one destiny" was the slogan chosen for the GA. Cogent and indisputable. But here is the criticism that can be leveled at the federations: The outstanding goal of this meeting is an economic one. Performance enhancement. That, in fact, is what has been said for years about the federations. So bogged down are they in trying to raise money that they have neglected the conceptual aspect - namely, what to do with the money.

Youngsters

Barry Shrage, from the Boston Jewish Federation, did not have to be coerced into attending the concert: He is fond of country music. A few days earlier, Shrage convened a few people from the Taglit-birthright Israel program and a few leaders of Hillel, the American student organization, to view a presentation he had prepared. They came to it convinced and they left it convinced. Shrage believes that birthright - the program that offers every young Jew from abroad a whirlwind visit to Israel - can change the face of American Jewry. The calculation is simple: The money that billionaire Sheldon Adelson has decided to donate to the project is allowing it to expand rapidly. Gidi Mark, the birthright delegate to the GA, has already looked into the possibility of bringing 60,000 youngsters to Israel to mark Israel's 60th anniversary. That won't happen, not this year. But 40,000 will participate, and next year maybe more - "half of the young Jewish people born in America every year," Shrage notes.

Anyone who read the latest demographic study by Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman and was seized by anxiety, should go back for another look. True, young American Jews are losing a sense of connection with Israel, but not those who have traveled there with birthright. If half of their cohort can go every year, this trend will be reversed.

Accordingly, Shrage is now an ardent ambassador for the program. He will undoubtedly want to see the pilot he is now conducting in Boston tried in other communities: birthright will fly the Jews to Israel and on their return, pass on their names and details to Hillel, whose role is to ensure that someone maintains ties with them back on campus. At the same time, the age of participants will be lowered. The younger the student, the more years he will have left on campus to strengthen his involvement with Israel. The Boston federation is already paying the salaries of six campus professionals to do just that.

Birthright is mentioned at the GA in every panel, by almost every speaker. But it is an example of an initiative into which the federations were dragged almost by force. It is an innovative idea that refused to yield to the establishment's stranglehold, and instead taught it a lesson whose impact is still felt. Yet even now a debate continues about the budget to be allocated by the federations to the project. The birthright people see the activists of the federations flaunt the project's success as though they were behind it, and they go ape. Yes, the federations are now budgeting birthright, but not sufficiently, in their view. Far from sufficiently. At the same time, a struggle is under way over the financing of another program that sends young people to Israel, but in far smaller numbers and for a far longer period - Masa, a Jewish Agency project. The Jewish Agency believes that Taglit-birthright is trying to eradicate Masa.

This is all part of the routine battle for a slice of the pie, for the money. The struggle is exacerbated by an Israeli request for more generous allocations from the federations' budgets, a clash among a few heavyweight donors in the Jewish Agency, and squabbling over the opening of offices of the federations and the Jewish Agency in Israel and the United States. Every struggle comes with its own little story. The public takes no interest in them, and rightly so. The bureaucracy of Jewish organizations is a boring and bothersome business. But the ramifications are important.

Pep talk

Rieger has a simple formula that will help resolve these disputes: If we raise more money, he tells Haaretz, there will be enough to go around. This year's GA was a professional gathering, with the goal of improving fundraising. In January, the federations will launch a major study to help them better understand the donors. Many of the federations have already introduced new and modern tools for measuring performance. Here again the organization is seen in its strength and its weakness: Those who are being gauged by their ability to raise funds might have a hard time devoting their energy to questions of principle, to being true community leaders.

A speaker from the Tennessee Jewish committee was brought to the GA's opening session - a genuine local hero: Bruce Pearl, coach of the University of Tennessee basketball powerhouse. Last year the team reached the "Sweet Sixteen" level of the NCAA tournament; this year it is expected to go higher. Pearl, charismatic and funny, gave the activists a pep talk, as though they were at the halftime break, preparing to take the floor again in their sweaty uniforms. To excel, he said, you first have to find something you are good at - and then improve on it.

"Fundraising is really what we do best," Rieger admitted the next day. That is certainly something the federations can excel at. They always have.

This GA, says Israel's minister of Diaspora affairs (and of other important spheres), Isaac Herzog, the senior Israeli representative at the GA, is actually more important than its predecessors, which focused on seemingly more exciting issues. Its main theme, "the structure and function of the community," is, after all, the basis for all activity. If the federations succeed in their mission, American Jewry will maintain its ability to act as a collective that is stronger than the sum of its parts. If not, it will atomize.

Herzog is a responsible adult who is aware of the limitations of the establishment, but also understands its importance. Still, he is also the representative of a sector - the Israeli sector - which also has a salient economic interest in this meeting.

In any event, the federations' campaign for renewal is still in mid-course. Their success depends in large measure on their ability to persuade people that they have changed their approach and learned from the criticism. In the meantime, a lot of vibrant young people, the faces of the Jewish future, are taking the stage. Some of them are dizzying success stories, some level familiar accusations at the federations. The veteran activists are used to this and have learned to take it in their stride.

"We live in a world in which everything is voluntary," Rieger points out. He believes that this ponderous organization will be able to adapt to the new world. To fly in the direction that the wind is blowing. After all, this is the only real choice: to make another million or wind up broke.*-

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