Special Interview Reform Without Fanfare

Finance Minister Yigal Hurwitz was wrestling with his colleagues in the Cabinet over the size of next year’s budget while reporters gathered outside to hear what it would all mean for the packet book and shopping bag of the ordinary man and woman Akiva Levinsky, quiet-spoken and businesslike at his office in the Jewish Agency building, hall a mile away could scarcely fail to make the comparison.

The ministers, he noted, naturally enough, were concerned about the future of their specific ministries while Hurwitz was trying to make them look at the picture as a whole. In his two years at the treasury of the Jewish Agency, Levinsky encounters virtually the same challenge week in and week out. The figures involved, of course, are smaller. Still, on annual budget of more than $500 million is a massive responsibility by any yardstick.

But making his assessment, midway between world Zionist congresses, Levinsky is not pessimistic. “The members of the Executive (who head the Agency’s departments) are slowly agreeing to become part of an overall approach, to see the overall problems as well as their own particular department’s concerns.”

REFORMS HAVE BEEN SWEEPING

Levinsky’s reforms — still in the process of evolution — have been sweeping indeed. It is character with the man that they have been undertaken without fanfare — without the publicity and public recognition, in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora, that they perhaps should have.

Levinsky is keenly aware of the Jewish Agency’s “image” problems, and spends a good deal of time thinking about them. “But in the Sinai analysis,” he says, image is shaped by what is actually done. No amount of “packaging” can sell a commodity that is faulty, and similarly to amount of negative preconceptions can present the Jewish Agency’s public image improving if the work of the departments and of the Agency as a whole is genuinely meritorious.

Apropos of “image,” Levinsky points to a conundrum which, he says, continues to baffle him. While the Jewish Agency as such suffers, especially in the Israeli media, from an undeniable “image problem,” the individual departments that together comprise the Agency each separately have a good and often very good “image Take the settlement department, for example,” he says, “or youth aliya.”

Even the two education departments (Torah education and education in the galah), which are often criticized in the press — “Have you ever heard any criticism of the hundreds of teachers they send out each year to Jewish schools around the world? Why, Jewish education would literally crumble away in many countries without those teachers …”

On the day of our interview there had been a particularly damaging story on the front page of a leading Israeli paper regarding an education department head who had stayed abroad longer than the three weeks Agency chairman Leon Dulzin has stipulated as the maximum duration of trips by department heads. In addition, the paper wrote, he had taken his wife with him at the Agency’s expense.

ISSUE OF ‘IMAGE’

“There has to be a goodly measure of common sense in such things,” Levinsky says. On the one hand, the work of such departments is done primarily abroad and obviously, therefore, their top executive must do a lot of travelling. The three-week rule, moreover, is intended as a guideline — “not as an iron-clod law.” At the same time, Agency personnel, and especially the leadership, must plainly take greater account of the sensitivities involved (not to mention the budgetary constraints), Levinsky observes.

He says the root-cause of the Jewish Agency’s “image problem” — and of much of the inefficiency and laxity that still bedevils some departments — is the political party system on which the Agency is based.

“If you ask me,” he says, “on executive of five members is enough.” But it is the will of the public — in Israel and in the diaspora — that wants (as expressed in the elections to the Zionist congresses) a proliferation of parties. Each of these parties and movements demands a slice of the power and influence. Thus, in practice, a wholesale reduction of the Executive portfolios is “impossible.”

“It is unfair,” Levinsky adds, for politicians who themselves press for this sort of “carve-up of the spoils” during and after every election campaign, to then publicly criticize the Agency for, among other things, “politicization” and proliferation of parties.

HEALTHY ACHIEVEMENTS CITED

Despite the limitations imposed by this political reality, Levinsky’s achievements in his two years at the treasury have been impressive. Last year alone, Agency manpower costs were reduced by 15 percent and the actual number of Agency employees was cut by 11.5 percent. (Not all manpower posts were filled in the past.)

He introduced a system of “three-year plans” as part of his overall planning-oriented approach. (Levinsky, scion of the Labor movement and longtime member of Kibbutz Maayan Zvi, came to Agency from a top slot in the Bank Hopoalim commercial empire.)

The original “three-year plan” will be updated this year according to changing conditions. Another novelty: “evaluation teams,” comprising Agency officials and outside experts, are commissioned to review and supervise major Agency projects.

Budget calculations — perhaps traditionally the key function of the treasurer — have also undergone a thorough overhaul. “We look at everything from the starting point of budget-zero,” Levinsky says proudly. This means that nothing is untouchable or sacrosanct, everything is put under a critical microscope by the finance department’s team of expert economists — many of them top-flight men groomed over the years by Levinsky’s predecessor, Leon Dulzin.

Levinsky also insists on “full disclosure” of all background data to the Board of Governors and its relevant committees.