Melchior candidacy puts WZO, JA on 'collision course,' warn officials

The expected election next month of Rabbi Michael Melchior, a dovish politician, will lead to a clash between the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, chaired by the hawkish Nathan Sharansky, asserts a WZO official.

"If Melchior, who is further to the left than most Kadima members, is elected to head the WZO, it will put him on a collision course with Sharansky and with people from the organization itself," a WZO official said on condition on anonymity. "Many people feel as though Melchior's candidacy is being shoved down their throats," said another source familiar with both bodies, citing the fact that Melchior is not formally a member of WZO steering committee.

In an interview with Anglo File about his candidacy, the Danish-born former legislator for Meimad says he has a personal friendship with Sharansky who voted against the Disengagement plan, which he says will help them "cooperate very nicely."

In the past, the head of the Jewish Agency - Israel's largest nongovernmental body for encouraging and supporting immigration - used to preside also as chairman of the WZO, an international entity working to instill and promote Zionism abroad and locally. U.S. representatives in the Jewish Agency, seeking to minimize the influence of the WZO on the JA, pushed through a reform to end this arrangement to create a clearer division between the two bodies, the world's oldest Zionist organizations.

The source familiar with WZO affairs said the division will reduce friction between the Jewish Agency and the much smaller WZO - an entity made up of three main divisions, among them the Hagshama department for involving young Diaspora Jews in Zionist projects. "The Jewish Agency and the WZO parted ways," he said. "The idea was to allow the Jewish Agency to focus on practical action while setting the WZO free to pursue its ideology." This divorce, the source said, along with making the WZO financially independent from the Jewish Agency, will mean less ideological clashes regardless of the political affiliation of the two men heading the organization.

"The Jewish Agency, which supports the WZO with an annual budget of $8 million, plans to make the WZO independent by 2013," a Jewish Agency official said. However, half of the Jewish Agency's 120 members in the Board of Governors are WZO members.

As reported by Haaretz, Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livi invited Melchior to be the party's candidate, even though he is not a party member. The WZO steering committee, which may decide on the nomination August 3, is made up of 22 representatives from a number of Israeli parties and Jewish groups.

Kadima has the largest representation based on the 2006 Knesset elections and is viewed to have dibs on replacing Zeev Bielski, who stood down to take a Knesset seat. This invitation angered many of Livni's party members, according to a member of a WZO committee.

"Multi-millionaire Galia Albin, who ran on Livni's list for Knesset, is prepared to take the WZO job for no salary," the committee member said. "So why should they take a salaried chairman who's not even from the party?"

Besides Melchior, Albin and Merom, other WZO officials mentioned as possible candidates Dick Hirsch, a Conservative rabbi, and former Labor MK Colette Avital. The Mizrahi movement - which objects to Melchior's nomination - is having trouble coming up with an agreed-upon candidate.

David Breakstone from the Conservative movement, Kadima's partner in the WZO alliance which supports Melchior's nomination, said: "What Melchior will bring into the organization is a very good understanding of the Diaspora, which is what we need right now."

Whoever wins, Melchior says the WZO is suffering from being leaderless. "It doesn't matter if it's me who's elected in the end or not, but the lack of leadership is very damaging to the organization," he says. "The WZO is losing people. We need to engage young people and offer then a new Zionist platform."

The ex-MK - who is also the titular chief Orthodox rabbi of Norway - says he expects "to work in harmony" with Sharansky, adding: "It's debatable whether the separation of the WZO from the Jewish Agency was a good thing. I wouldn't have minded seeing Sharansky stay on as WZO chair."