Across the country, leaders of local Jewish federations are pondering how to respond to Israel’s urgent call for help in absorbing the historic Soviet aliyah without abandoning their commitment to assist the Soviet Jews still coming to the United States.
The United Jewish Appeal announced Jan. 19 that it was launching a special campaign, Operation Exodus, in order to raise $420 million for the absorption of the Soviet Jews now streaming into Israel at a rate of about 4,000 each month.
But Operation Exodus, unlike last year’s Passage to Freedom effort, does not address the question of how to pay for the needs of thousands of Soviet Jews still entering this country.
Soviet Jewish emigration to this country is not expected to drop much below last year’s level of about 40,000, and most of the immigrants will continue to cluster in seven “impacted communities” in the United States.
The abandonment by UJA of the Passage to Freedom approach — fund-raising for “here and there” at the same time — leaves federations with the challenge of juggling domestic resettlement needs with the demands of the special UJA campaign.
To coordinate their strategy collectively, some 200 federations are taking part in a highly unusual general assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations on Feb. 6 in Miami.
National leaders are optimistic that the gathering will produce an approach that ensures broad support for the UJA drive while also taking care of local needs.
DESIRE TO ‘DO THE RIGHT THING’
“There’s an almost universal desire to do the right thing,” Donald Feldstein, associate executive vice president of the Council of Jewish Federations, said of Operation Exodus. “I think people are going to make an honest attempt, and I think it’s doable.”
Most federation leaders are highly supportive of UJA’s decision to launch Operation Exodus as a campaign solely for resettlement in Israel.
They point out that, faced with growing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, a panicked desire by Soviet Jews to leave, and loud voices from Israel calling out for action and assistance, UJA had no choice but to focus the campaign on the Soviets going to Israel.
“UJA is trying to respond as well as it can to an international emergency,” said Barry Schrage, executive vice president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston.
“Honest people sat down and decided that this is what is needed to be done to rescue our people,” he said.
UJA’s decision to launch the $420 million special campaign for resettlement, Shrage explained, was a strategic move “to refocus from a low-key settlement problem” to a “drop-everything” call for immediate action.
“This is what we didn’t get to do in World War II,” he said. “And there’s no one who knows the situation in the Soviet Union right now who’s implied it’s anything but a desperate situation.”
But at least one local leader has questioned UJA’s approach. A federation executive director from one city criticized the decision to launch Operation Exodus as a campaign solely for resettlement in Israel.
“I, for one, don’t make a distinction between the need to settle Soviet Jews in the United States and Israel. I think the notion of doing this is short-sighted and will be very divisive,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.
“It’s got to be a united effort,” he said. “Too many of these folks are coming to the United States.”
INDIVIDUAL OR SHARED BURDEN?
Foremost among the policy decisions that will be discussed at the Feb. 6 assembly will be “whether the federations want to adopt some form of collective responsibility,” for Soviet Jews settling in the United States, said Feldstein.
The choice will be whether American Jewish communities affected by Soviet immigration will generally fend for themselves this year or whether the burden should be shared.
The idea of redistributing domestic resettlement costs among U.S. Jewish federations, said Feldstein, might ultimately be combined with Operation Exodus target figures, putting the national fund-raising efforts into a global picture.
“What I’ve picked up in the last couple of months,” he said, “is an inclination that it would be better if we could deal with the whole package as a unit.”
But another CJF official said he believes it will be left up to each individual community to decide whether to raise funds for Operation Exodus separately or combine it with their campaigns for the resettlement of Soviet Jews here.
The UJA Operation Exodus drive “will be carried out as a separate campaign, and each federation will determine in its own way how to go about it,” said Bernard Olshansky, CJF assistant executive vice president.
It is difficult for many federation leaders to comprehend how the dual resettlement challenges will be met without sacrifices in programs and plans in their own communities.
“We can’t forever put off radical increases for Jewish education, funding to help the handicapped, the elderly and the mentally ill,” said Schrage of Boston.
A ‘MOVING TARGET’?
Though UJA leaders have said bravely that Operation Exodus will not cut into regular campaigns, there is “some degree of trepidation” about the toll it will take, admitted Harry Kosansky, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Buffalo.
Federations had just been “beginning to digest the $350 million figure” that UJA had originally set for Operation Exodus, Feldstein of CJF said, when the growing need in Israel pushed it up to the $420 million mark and reduced the amount of time to collect it to three years.
In San Francisco, for example, the Jewish Community Federation had already launched a $7 million campaign to settle Soviet Jews in Israel, with the earlier $350 million figure and the five-year time frame in mind.
Now, said Rabbi Brian Lurie, the federation’s executive director, “we’ll have to reassess that goal in what increasingly is beginning to look like a moving target.”
(Contributing to this report were J.J. Goldberg of the New York Jewish Week and Winston Pickett of the Northern California Jewish Bulletin.)
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
