The Council of Jewish Federations took two steps forward this week toward a North American Jewish community that sees itself, and governs itself, as more than a collection of localities across the continent.
Meeting in St. Louis, the CJF board of directors approved new bylaws for the organization. The move, which needs to be ratified by a two-thirds vote at the CJF General Assembly in November, would effectively turn the CJF into a parliament of the local federations of North America.
And in a related change, the CJF board of directors approved a plan that will change the way some national Jewish agencies are funded by local federations.
Both moves are being hailed as enabling federations and the CJF to deal more effectively with problems of a continental nature. (Continental is the term of choice, rather than national, because CJF includes Canadian federations.)
These problems range from funding population studies and disaster aid, to dealing with assimilation and the migration of elderly Jews.
“If we really mean what we say, that every Jew is responsible for one another, that has to be translated in time into the ability to act nationally,” said Conrad Gyles, co-chairman of the committee that drafted the new governance proposal.
“We have to recognize that our responsibilities go beyond our local communities,” said Gyles, who is also a CJF vice president.
While federations have always sent nearly half of the money they raised overseas, primarily to Israel, problems in America are generally addressed on a city-by-city basis.
The idea of federations taking responsibility for continental problems has arisen in recent years.
The watershed is considered to have been a 1990 decision that federations would chip in a “fair share” of the overall cost of resettling refugees from the former Soviet Union, rather than having the costs paid individually by the Jewish communities where they settled.
A year later, CJF approved a similar “fair share” method in underwriting up to $900 million worth of loans to immigrants in Israel.
And this week, CJF authorized a $2 million relief fund for the Miami area, following the damage caused by Hurricane Andrew.
Such efforts, however, have been hampered by the inability of CJF to demand, rather than ask, money of its members.
“We can’t force anybody to pay their share,” said a CJF official, “even though their share is necessary to solve the problem.”
Also, many federations without representatives on the current CJF board argue that requests to contribute constitute “taxation without representation.”
A third of the federations, for example, did not pay the amount they were assessed for the 1990 National Jewish Population Study.
Under the proposed new CJF bylaws, all federations – numbering nearly 190 – will have at least two delegates on a Board of Delegates, which will number 460 to 500 members.
Delegates will wield a weighted vote, reflecting the size of their Jewish community and the amount of money the federation raises. The largest city, New York, will command 92 votes.
All votes will be cast as a bloc, emphasizing the fact that delegates vote only as representatives of their federations.
And to ensure that CJF reflects the needs of all its members, the proposed executive committee will guarantee representation from small- and medium-sized cities from the different regions of the continent.
“There’s a perception – and to some extent it is the reality – that power in the CJF is concentrated in a few well-populated cities,” said Gyles, who is from Detroit.
The feeling, he said, “is that “if you lived in Peoria or Buffalo, you did not have a consistent voice and did not have a forum to express your community’s needs.”
Along with increased representation, the proposed new bylaws will impose, for the first time, actual taxation on member federations.
If approved by a large enough vote, what planners are calling a “mega- majority,” CJF will be able to demand payment from its member federations, up to a specified limit.
As proposed, that limit stands at 0.1 percent of the annual campaign, a sum equal to roughly $850,000. The amount allocated to various federations would range from $70 for the smallest to nearly $50,000 to New York.
But this overall limit is less than half of the amount judged necessary, and approved on a non-binding basis, for the Miami hurricane relief effort.
Gyles and other advocates anticipate that the CJF taxation powers will, over time, be increased.
“There were far more suggestions that the federation system could tolerate an even greater sum, rather than lesser,” said Gyles, referring to the feedback received at 14 presentations of the plan made across North America over the past two years.
“But there was an overall sense we could satisfy virtually all federations by sticking to this number,” he explained.
The proposal would require that any mandatory levy be approved by both 85 percent of the federations voting on the issue and by 85 percent of the weighted votes cast.
This dual majority is seen as comparable to the U.S. Congress, where all states have an equal vote in the Senate but a vote weighted by population in the House of Representatives.
The 85 percent figure was chosen to allow any grouping of federations – the small federations or the federations in the Southwest, for example – to block a levy they opposed, while making it impossible for the three largest federations to veto a measure on their own.
In addition, any vote on such a measure would require ample notice and a larger than usual quorum. In an emergency situation, the smaller executive committee could approve a binding levy, but only if all federations were given notice and the telephone numbers of all executive committee members to make their opinions known.
The other measure passed by the board of directors that reflects concern for continental responsibility involves the funding of national Jewish agencies.
For decades, the budgets of 18 national agencies, ranging from the Anti- Defamation League to the North American Jewish Students Appeal, have been examined and approved by a CJF committee known as the Large Cities Budgeting Conference.
On the basis of the amount validated by the conference, the organizations make their fund-raising appeals to the various federations.
In recent years, the amounts actually raised have fallen further and further below the amount authorized by the conference.
Under the new plan, which will take effect starting in April, the budgeting conference will be replaced by two committees jointly referred to as the National Funding Councils.
These councils will give federations a greater voice, since their votes will be weighted based on how much they are willing to contribute to the national agencies.
The funding councils will directly allocate the money contributed by the member federations, meaning that the national organizations selected to be allocated” will not have to make separate appeals to all of the member federations.
At the same, because the funding councils will have a direct influence on the budgets of the national agencies, the new structure is seen as giving federations a greater influence over the national agencies.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
