Local communities will gain five specific benefits by the establishment of a national advisory budget service. William J. Shroder of Cincinnati, chairman of the board of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, has declared in a letter to Jewish welfare funds throughout the country.
Urging the Council’s member agencies to approve the proposals for such an advisory service during the referendum now being conducted by the Council on this matter, Shroder listed the benefits as follows:
“1. It will strengthen community organization in this country–by developing improved relationships between the national agencies themselves, and between the national agencies and the local communities.
“2. It will provide local communities with a broader picture and more complete understanding of the needs and aspirations of the Jewish groups both at home and abroad than has ever been available to them in the past.
“3. It will lay a firm foundation for improved fund-raising programs in each community by basing appeals on authoritative and unquestioned facts and figures, objectively and fairly interpreted, rather than on competitive and conflicting pressures.
“4. It will encourage the development of more specific and realistic budgets by each of the national and overseas agencies, budgets embodying the recognition of the relationships of their own program and expenditures to total needs and to the funds available at the moment or in the predictable future.
“5. It will stimulate greater cooperation between the national agencies, especially those operating in the same fields, in regard to their functional program, and might help eliminate any possible unnecessary duplication among them.”
Meanwhile, Hadassah, asserting that the voice of the entire Jewish people must be heard through the communities on the needs of Palestine and other causes, placed itself on record in opposition to the budgeting proposal. In a letter addressed to all Hadassah chapter presidents, Mrs. Moses P. Epstein, national coordinator of fund raising, warned that if the referendum endorsed the establishment of a national budgeting committee, such action would have “serious consequences not only for the Zionist movement, but for the future health and growth of the American Jewish community.”
“Such a procedure,” she said, “would substitute for popular mass opinion the dictation, well meaning though it might be, of a small group that must necessarily be influenced by its own ideology and point of view on Jewish life.”
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.
