Njcrac Looks to Its Future After Compromise with Agencies

A new compromise plan for the future of the Jewish communal world’s national public affairs body has averted a rupture in relations between its local and national member agencies.

The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council has issued a strategic plan that it claims will make it a stronger and more responsive coordinator of public policy for its 117 local community relations council members.

The most important change is that NJCRAC for the first time will have a presence in the nation’s capital, although its role will be severely limited.

In fact, the new plan’s overall vision of NJCRAC falls far short of the aspirations its leaders originally had outlined for the organization.

It reflects a series of concessions to NJCRAC’s 13 national agency members after a power tussle that included threats by the most influential that they would walk away.

For his part, Phil Baum, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, one of the national agencies, hailed the compromise.

With it, “NJCRAC has preserved its relationships with the national agencies,” he said.

Without it, “there was every likelihood there would be a dissolution of NJCRAC as we know it,” he said, adding, “It is very gratifying that a resolution of our differences was achieved.”

The Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress, in particular, had claimed that the earlier plan had pushed NJCRAC beyond its mandate, which they said was to help coordinate consensus on major policy issues of the day.

They held that turning NJCRAC into a “full-service” agency would clutter an already crowded public policy field. They especially railed against the prospect of competition and duplication posed by a separate NJCRAC office in Washington.

The defense agencies also balked at a radical proposal for federations to funnel the roughly $3 million they now give to national agencies into a central funding pool overseen by NJCRAC for public policy projects.

For their part, NJCRAC leaders maintained that as times have changed, the needs of local councils have changed and NJCRAC would become irrelevant if it did not become more activist and provide them with more help in the public policy arena.

Intensive behind-the-scenes negotiations culminated in a recently formalized agreement between NJCRAC and the three defense agencies and the subsequent issue of the new plan.

NJCRAC will convene a special plenary session next month to approve the plan.

The most important victory for the local councils is the plan’s provision for a NJCRAC presence in Washington.

Another is the elimination of the veto power previously enjoyed by the national member agencies over the NJCRAC position statement with which they disagreed.

Many local councils believed that such a veto had long loomed as an unjust power imbalance in favor of the national agencies.

The plan takes pains, however, to provide for “exemptions” to policy statements based on religious convictions, which will apply only to denominational bodies. This was clearly meant to keep within the fold the Orthodox Union, which had strongly protested any plans to eliminate the veto.

Despite such concessions, however, Lawrence Rubin, NJCRAC’s executive vice chairman, lauded the plan as “a road map” to “develop NJCRAC as a more effective and responsive public affairs mechanism” going into the next century.

The compromise, he added, reflects “the habit of the community to come together at the end of the day to look for a consensus.”

The sensitivity in reaching a consensus is reflected plainly in the “memo of understanding” with the three defense agencies, particularly on the issue of a NJCRAC role in Washington.

The memo calls this “clearly the most difficult issue for us to agree upon.”

It pledges to limit NJCRAC’s presence so it “complements, does not compete with, the ongoing Washington operations of the national agencies” That includes tight restrictions on NJCRAC’s activities on Capitol Hill.

“We will maintain a presence in Washington which will include not more than a single professional and clerical support staff, to be housed in the existing Washington office of one of our member agencies or of the CJF,” the Council of Jewish Federations.

Federations fund the lion’s share of NJCRAC’s budget.

NJCRAC also pledged to continue to initiate any request to the field for action from the New York office and “would not attempt to substitute itself for the defense agencies as a definitive address for the organized Jewish community.”

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the plan “a constructive compromise” and said both it and the agreement reflected “an element of respect for each other’s roles, prerogatives and responsibilities.”

“No one wanted to see the agencies walk” and “everyone wanted to see NJCRAC strengthened,” Robin said. The understanding “lifted everyone’s comfort level.”