Behind the Headlines: Clal Returns to Its Roots, Finding Stability and Focus [part 2 of a Series]

For CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, the Jewish community’s renewed interest in Jewish renewal is a return to its own organizational roots.

It was founded as the National Jewish Conference Center in 1974, in the wake of the first concern among Jewish lay leaders over lack of Jewish identity in the community.

Its mission, as stated at the time: “to catalyze spiritual renewal in American Jewish life through innovative leadership-training programs, conducted in partnership with other national and local Jewish agencies and organizations.”

That describes its present agenda almost to a tee.

But during the intervening two decades, CLAL suffered more than once from organizational whiplash, as founder Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg rapidly turned his attention from one subject to the next.

“Yitz is one of the most creative and innovative minds in American Jewish life, a serious thinker who also has a pragmatic bent to him,” says Michael Berenbaum, project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a former colleague of Greenberg’s.

As Greenberg himself has acknowledged, however, his administrative skills are no match for his fertile ideas.

“Yitz didn’t want to create programs; he wanted to transform the Jewish world tomorrow,” says David Elcott, CLAL’s program director. “Though his philosophy was tikkun olam (transforming the world) one step at a time, that didn’t apply to him.”

At the core of Greenberg’s philosophy are two revolutionizing events: the Holocaust and the rebirth of the State of Israel. In light of those events, Greenberg came to believe that a new era in Jewish history had begun, and the old divisions between Orthodox and Reform, religious and secular, made little sense.

So out of the conviction that the Holocaust was not being appreciated as a seminal event, Greenberg and co-founder Elie Wiesel focused on commemorating and interpreting the tragedy.

In 1978, the then-National Jewish Conference Center formed Zachor: The Holocaust Resource Center. It was intended to be one of six components of the Conference Center, but the necessary funding for the rest never came through.

Berenbaum served as Zachor’s associate director. And when President Jimmy Carter formed his national commission on the Holocaust, he tapped both Greenberg and Wiesel as its leaders. The commission led to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which is set to open in April.

With the Holocaust firmly entrenched in both the communal and national consciousness, CLAL shifted its focus toward the education of Jewish lay leaders, along the way changing its name to the National Jewish Resource Center.

Elcott was hired nine years ago to expand and consolidate the organizational programming.

But by 1985, Greenberg became alarmed at the rising tensions between Orthodoxy and the other denominations over such issues as changing Israel’s Law of Return and the institution by the Reform movement of patrilineal descent.

Divisions he had seen as decreasingly relevant in light of the Holocaust threatened to become chasms, leading him to ask the question which became the title of a widely published article, “Will there be one Jewish people in the year 2000?”

To address the issue, CLAL garnered a $1 million grant and launched a new program aimed at promoting intergroup understanding and cooperation.

This new focus coincided with CLAL changing its name, for the third time, to the National Center for Learning and Leadership.

The name change, while reflecting a shift in the nuances of the organization’s programming, more importantly enabled it to highlight its interdenominational work by creating an acronym that matches the first half of the Hebrew phrase “Clal Yisrael,” referring to the totality and unity of the Jewish people.

Now, the issue of denominational unity has receded to the background. CLAL leaders say they have discovered that public discussions on the issue tended only to raise tensions.

“It’s like marriage counseling,” says Rabbi Steven Greenberg, a member of CLAL’s faculty. “If they’re not committed to it, and you drag them to two sessions where they air their grievances and that’s it, it only gets worse.

“Also, people don’t care. We can’t sell a program on that issue,” he adds.

The concern over being able to sell a program reflects the institutionalization of CLAL, its growing stability and its independence from founder Greenberg.

Greenberg, in fact, is on sabbatical in Israel this year to write a book.

The emphasis on marketing also reflects the organization’s response to a debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars that is still being paid off, accumulated in an abortive effort to create a conference center along the lines envisioned by the organization’s original name.

At the same time, CLAL’s programming, reflecting Greenberg’s ideas, is being sought by the community. Money is now available for CLAL to do what it set out to do back in 1974.

“Yitz was prescient in his call for this,” says Shoshana Cardin, CLAL’s incoming chairman. “Everybody is agreeing with the point that we have to reinvest in providing meaning and commitment into the enterprise.”

Jewish family foundations are joining in and granting funds to CLAL to expand its work.

In the largest such grant, Charles and Andy Bronfman are giving CLAL $1 million over several years to expand its training programs for rabbis, federation professionals and Jewish community center workers. Also supporting the new program are the Wexner Foundation, and Jack and Helen Nash. It is a significant sum for the organization, which operated on a $2.2 million budget in 1992.

Much as the interdenominational work enabled rabbis to realize, many for the first time, that despite their ideological and religious differences they were in many ways working for the same ends, the new programs are aimed at linking together the different Jewish professionals.

CLAL brought 71 rabbinical students to the recent General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations as a way of introducing them to the secular world of Jewish activism.

CLAL has also received grants to develop programs for college students, with the cooperation of both national and local Hillel foundations.

These programs take advantage of CLAL’s experience in working with leadership, in making traditional texts relevant and in transcending denominational boundaries. They bring CLAL’s original mission — itself a response to concern raised by student activists two decades ago — back to the campus.

One program, at the University of Texas, included an exploration of the Jewish sense of leadership through the study of Genesis 12 and Exodus 19, containing the idea that the Jewish people are a “leadership cadre,” according to Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who ran the program.

“We were getting them to open up all their discomfort about the idea of chosenness, to realize that feeling proud and happy about their Jewishness is not an arrogance. In multicultural lingo, to want to date only Jews is racist and wrong; we wanted to help them understand how a consciousness can relate to peoplehood, without it giving way to demagoguery.

“Also, very few of the students had been given a sense of Jewishness that could hold together; certainly not enough to limit one’s life partner. To provide a larger imagination of what it means to be part of a 3,000-year-old mission to create a certain kind of community, is very exciting to people,” says Greenberg.