Njcrac Adopts Strategic Plan After Averting Orthodox Exit

The Jewish community’s national public affairs body has averted a walkout by the Orthodox Union after meeting the group’s demands on dissent from collective policy on religious issues.

That paved the way for the approval of what has been a controversial strategic plan to strengthen the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.

The plan, whose highlights include a new presence for NJCRAC in the nation’s capital, was passed overwhelmingly by a special plenary session after the adoption of an O.U. amendment on the right of religious dissent within the organization.

The discussion leading up to the vote on the O.U. proposal was impassioned and sometimes poignant.

Much of it focused on the technical question of whether and when NJCRAC letterhead would be used to issue statements that religious movements felt that they could not endorse.

But the underlying challenge clearly was show to balance the need to keep all three religious movements – Orthodox, Conservative and Reform – in the NJCRAC fold to maintain its integrity and the need to preserve NJCRAC’s ability to make an impact with its public statements.

After undergoing significant revisions before Monday’s vote, the strategic plan had been heralded as a compromise that would keep NJCRAC intact as an umbrella body of 117 local community relations councils and 13 national agencies, including the O.U.

The new plan, for instance, abolished the veto enjoyed by each of the national agencies. The veto, when exercised, effectively blocked NJCRAC from adopting public policy statements. This had been a thorn in the sides of community members who felt that their voices were being squelched in an anti-democratic fashion.

But the O.U. had strongly protested any plan to eliminate the veto, making it clear that it could not remain in NJCRAC without the ability to distance itself from positions that violated its fundamental religious convictions.

The O.U. has exercised the veto only twice in 14 years, both times in the 1980s. One was over the endorsement of a Shabbat march for housing, and the other was over a resolution voicing concerns about the views of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who had just been elected to the Knesset.

As a compromise, the new plan retained a special provision for a “religious conviction exception” to be available exclusively for religious bodies. The provision was widely seen as an attempt to placate the O.U. and keep it in the “family.”

Still, under the new plan, such policy statements, if supported by a majority of NJCRAC members, would have been issued in the name of “community caucus” under NJCRAC’s official letterhead.

At Monday’s session, O.U. representatives who had worked out the compromise announced that their own board had deemed it unacceptable.

The O.U. board instead proposed that statements subject to the “religious exception” provision be issued only in the name of a “community caucus” without NJCRAC’s imprimatur.

“Our board said no one in the world will understand the difference” between a position issued by a community caucus on NJCRAC letterhead that has been vetoed by the O.U. and a position endorsed by a majority of NJCRAC members, said Richard Stone, one of the O.U. representatives.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism staunchly allied itself with the O.U.’s position.

Religious denominations should have the right not to be identified “even by misperception” by a decision of the collective, said the United Synagogue’s Menachem Rosensaft.

“This was not an unreasonable ultimatum by one group” and was not “an issue of how to keep the O.U. in” NJCRAC, said Rosensaft.

“This was about strengthening the Jewish community collectively to express its point of view as effectively as possible,” he said. “You can’t have such a voice without including the religious movements.”

NJCRAC is “the one vehicle in which the secular communities and all three major religious denominations are able to sit and debate and discuss” issues of public policy, he added.

The Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations also voiced support for the O.U. amendment, as did the American Jewish Congress and he Anti-Defamation League.

“I think it is imperative to retain them in the agency,” Phil Baum, AJCongress executive director, said of the O.U.

But the vote clearly was a blow to some of the plan’s authors and a setback to the plan’s efforts to strengthen NJCRAC’s collective clout.

“NJCRAC tried to be accommodating, spending more time with [the O.U.] than any other agency,” Lynn Lyss, chair of the strategic planning committee, said before the vote.

Indeed, a vote for the O.U. proposal “would render us invisible and our communal voice moot,” Lyss said to the plenary.

“No single agency should be able to arrest the expression of a national public affairs consensus,” she added. “We urge you to vote no.”

Afterward, Lawrence Rubin, NJCRAC executive vice chairman, praised the “thoughtful quality” of the discussion, saying that “everyone was motivated by a sense of `klal’ (community) and maintaining the system.”

As a result of the vote, there will be “progress toward collective expression, though not as much as we would like,” he said.

Still, “it was necessary to keep the O.U. in the system and we can live with it,” he added.