A proposed plan to merge the central American Jewish fund-raising organizations is being honed on the heels of last week’s quarterly meeting of the Council of Jewish Federations in Detroit.
The plan calls for fusing into a new single entity the CJF, the United Jewish Appeal and the United Israel Appeal, the agencies that oversee a national $725 million annual campaign for local American Jewish needs and for humanitarian projects in Israel and elsewhere overseas.
Discussion in Detroit focused, as expected, on the thorniest problems the plan poses, said Joel Tauber, UJA president and co-chairman of the committee formed to study restructuring the national agencies to make them more effective.
The problems include finding a formula to ensure that enough funding will flow to overseas projects at a time when federal cuts are poised to eviscerate local programs funded by federations.
Also at issues is the governance structure and how to ensure within it a balance between advocates of local programs and those representing overseas interests.
Subcommittees in these areas are continuing their work, while two new subcommittees are being formed, one to devise ways to increase the overall campaign and one to make the new organization’s administration more efficient, Tauber said.
The merger proposal was drafted by the Committee to Study the National Structure, under the auspices of the CJF and UJA. The committee is scheduled to take up the plan again Oct. 19 in New York.
Sometime afterward, the plan is expected to be presented to federations across the country.
Ultimately, it will have to be approved by the boards of the CJF, UJA, UIA and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee also known as the JDC, which supports humanitarian projects abroad.
The CJF is the association of Jewish community federations, which raise money in concert with the UJA.
Federations now decide how much money to keep at home and how much to allocate for overseas. That allocation is given to the UJA, which divides the money between the UIA and JDC, which co-own UJA.
The JDC would remain independent under the proposed plan.
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.
