National Service Agencies Defended

This is the first of a series of articles. The second will appear Wednesday. Dr. Karpf is the director of the Graduate School for Jewish Social Service Work in New York.

BY DR. MAURICE J. KARPF

Any consideration of social service on a national scale must be dealt with on the basis of a series of pictures of the services which the national social service agencies render, but first we must answer the question—”What is a national agency?”

It will be obvious that a definition will depend largely upon the point of view of him who attempts to define it. Thus, the national agency would say that it is an organization aiming to serve all of the needs of the Jewish community locally, nationally and overseas in its chosen field of activity.

I imagine that the chairman of a federation budget committee, who, we are told, is usually a hard-headed businessman — although I have never been able to understand just what hard-headedness means in this connection—would not be quite satisfied with my definition. It would be too long for him. He would seek a simpler and briefer definition and would probably define a national agency simply as a “nuisance.”

REGARD IT AS “PEST”

The executive directors of federations, who bear the brunt of negotiations with national agencies, will probably want to be even more brief, I think, in their definition of a national agency. To them, a national agency is just a “pest.”

And so I suppose that, if we were really to attempt to define a national agency and its service, we would have to take these three definitions into account. In other words, a national agency must serve the needs of the local, national and perhaps overseas needs in its field, but it can only serve these needs if it is both a “nuisance” and a “pest,” because otherwise it cannot get the funds with which to function properly.

It is even more difficult to define and classify the national agencies. For this discussion, they may be divided into three classes: national agencies for local needs, which serve local purposes; national agencies which serve the entire Jewish community of the United States; and national agencies which are serving or functioning overseas.

Were we to classify them by type of service, we would have to say that there is, first of all, a group of agencies which serve communities and individuals. Among these agencies would be included all the national hospitals in Denver, Los Angeles and elsewhere. We would have to include also the National Desertion Bureau which, though located in New York, really serves the entire country. We would have to include the National Farm School, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the National Council of Jewish Women, for each of these organization serves communities and individuals.

There is a second large group of national agencies which serve communities only. These might be termed the coordinating agencies.

In this category belong the Bureau of Jewish Social Research, the Council of Federations and Welfare Funds, the Jewish Welfare Board, the National Conference of Jewish Social Service, and the Graduate School for Jewish Social Work.

ANTI-DEFAMATION WORK

There is another group of national agencies which serve the Jewish community as a whole, in a protective capacity. These are the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the B’nai B’rith, especially its Anti-Defamation League, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

I am including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency among the national agencies for civic rights and protection, because without some such service as that which the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is rendering or is aiming to render, the work of these other agencies would be very seriously impaired, in my judgment.

A fourth group would consist of those national agencies which render service overseas. First and foremost among these would naturally be the Joint Distribution Committee. Then would come the various Palestinian organizations, the American Friends of the Hebrew University, the ORT, OZE and similar organizations.

IN EDUCATIONAL FIELD

Finally there would be a miscellaneous group of national agencies which are doing cultural and educational work, such as the Menorah Society, the various seminaries and, others, which we cannot treat here because our discussion is limited to the social service agencies.

Those who have attended meetings of the National Conference of Jewish Social Service during the last ten or fifteen years, or otherwise have kept in contact with the subject, know that the subject of the national agencies is perennial. It came up over and over again.

The conference has tried for many years to develop a modus operandi between the federations and the national agencies. It has never succeeded in this. There is still no satisfactory understanding