When it comes to risky start-ups, Charles Bronfman has an all-star record.
In 1968, the distillery fortune heir helped bring baseball’s National League to Montreal by providing financial backing for the Expos when a major partner pulled out of an already foundering franchise at the last minute. A baseball fan, Bronfman was the team’s first chairman.
Now the Montreal native is bringing his team-building experience to the 9- month-old partnership of the United Jewish Appeal, Council of Jewish Federations and United Israel Appeal, which are in the midst of a merger.
Bronfman, 67, was nominated last Friday to serve as the first chairman of the board of the partnership, currently called the UJA Federations of North America.
His nomination will have to be ratified once the merger of the three organizations — which represent North American Jewry’s primary fund-raising and service-providing agencies — is completed this spring.
“When you’re an inheritor, the chance to be a pioneer is exciting,” the Seagram’s Co. co-chairman said in an interview. “It was as exciting then” — at the Expos’ beginning — “as this is today.”
The federations and national organizations that make up the partnership are responsible for raising money and providing services for Jewish needs around the world. This week the partnership reported that its 1998 campaign has raised a record $743.6 million to date and is projected to close at around $759 million.
In recent years, the UJA-federation system has seen an increasing number of Jewish charitable dollars go to private foundations, such as those run by Bronfman and his family. So the selection of Bronfman to head the reconstituted federation system is being viewed by some as a major victory in the battle to bring these two worlds back together.
But Bronfman points out that he and his wife, Andrea, have always worked with the organized Jewish community.
“I know pretty well who the players are,” he said in his homespun way, referring to executives of the most major federations and the presidents of the partnership’s constituent agencies. “I have a pretty good understanding of the whos, the whats and the wheres.”
Bronfman’s involvement with the Jewish community may have been prompted by the charitable example set by his father, Samuel. His older brother, Edgar, is also a well-known philanthropist and the president of the World Jewish Congress.
But Charles’ Jewish activism began in his late teens. At 17, he started “covering cards” for the UJA campaign in Montreal. As an adult, he was the city’s federation campaign chairman, sat on the executive committee and served as president. He is currently the honorary president of the United Israel Appeal of Canada.
In the early 1980s, Bronfman served on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel, and most recently he took on volunteer positions at CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, which he now chairs.
Last fall, the bespectacled Bronfman was the international chairman of the partnership’s 1998 General Assembly, which attracted 5,000 people to Jerusalem, where it was held for the first time.
It was there that Bronfman announced his own partnership with Wall Street magnate Michael Steinhardt in launching Birthright Israel, which in the year 2000 is expected to offer every Jew in the world between the ages of 15 and 26 an educational trip to Israel. Bronfman and his wife had already joined with Steinhardt in the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education in 1997.
The Birthright program builds on one of Bronfman’s initiatives — Israel Experience Inc., a clearinghouse for teen Israel trips founded in 1993 by a coalition of the Charles and Andrea Bronfman Foundation, the UJA, CJF, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish Educational Service of North America and the Jewish Community Centers Association of America.
Bronfman made his first visit to Israel in 1958 — the same year that construction was completed on the Seagram building, a soaring skyscraper on Park Avenue designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.
Today he and his wife maintain a home in Jerusalem, along with residences in New York and Palm Beach, Fla.
Strengthening the bonds between North American and Israeli Jews is one of Bronfman’s longtime passions.
He recalls with evident appreciation how his extended family gave him a special present for his 60th birthday: the Bronfman Mifgashim Center in Jerusalem, where Israeli and Diaspora youth can have encounters (“mifgashim” in Hebrew) that Bronfman hopes will lead to long-term connections.
Bronfman was a great believer in Jewish continuity before the term was widely used.
Today the idea of continuity has been replaced by “renaissance” — a major theme of the new partnership’s mission, and one that Bronfman sees as essential for inspiring the Jewish community and for recruiting new blood and new ideas into the organization.
“What do we say to young, affluent, Americanized people,” he asks, to let them know there could be “something more in their life that may be missing?
“Maybe Jewish renaissance would be great for all of us,” he says. But he believes that achieving this and strengthening the unity of the Jewish people together will take “a different kind of organization.”
The game plan for that new entity is already in the works: a set of merger documents has been sent out to the local federations for their approval.
The merger will put community fund raising in the hands of the local federations and will give them a majority voice in running the mammoth organization.
At the same time, a consulting firm is going out into the communities to determine “what they want from this new structure.”
The report, Bronfman said, might serve as the basis for the entity’s strategic plan.
“We have to take it seriously, because our owners are talking.”
But Bronfman anticipates a curve ball or two in melding the agencies, which for a century have cooperated closely, but functioned separately.
“It’s that human question that’s so important,” he said, and one that he and the two other leaders of the entity — one volunteer and one professional – – must attend to as soon as they are named.
Leaders are meant to take risks, Bronfman said, and the biggest risk the new entity’s leaders face “is to get people on the same side, to blend together a group of both lay and professionals who want to go in the same direction” without holding one another back.
More than anything else, however, Bronfman sees providing inspiration as the new entity’s main job. Bronfman himself is clearly inspired.
“I think this is the golden age of the Jewish world,” he said, “and I think it’s now our duty, responsibility and enormous pleasure” to see to it that “that golden age goes on for a long time.
“We can’t guarantee it,” he said, “but, by gosh, I think this new system will help set things up so that our great success can be continued.”
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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.
