Intermountain Jewish News

Pressure is on for Jewish organizations to merge

NEW YORK — The recent cancellation of a major Jewish educational conference is the latest sign that the Jewish nonprofit world will shrink in coming months as some organizations move closer to extinction and others seek mergers.

Over the past year, the faltering economy and tight fundraising dollars have forced several Jewish institutions to cede their independence and fold into larger organizations.

Recent months have seen an open push for Jewish institutions to consider how they can work together to streamline an organizational world that apparently has become too robust to fund.

But the announcement earlier this month that the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education was canceling its annual conference and seeking ways to fold its programming into another existing Jewish organization could serve as a wake-up call that more such moves are on the way.

“In some ways, the CAJE closure is a big flashing red light of warning to other Jewish not-for-profits who should be looking for combination because if you wait too long, there may be nothing left to combine,” Jeffrey Solomon, the president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Foundation, told JTA.

The Jewish nonprofit world went through a dramatic change over the past two decades, moving away from a model that was funded primarily by a centralized Jewish federation system to more of a free-market system that was funded increasingly in large part by private philanthropists working on their own accord.

The free-market system created several layers of fat and overlap that could have been streamlined along the way — but must be trimmed now, according to Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish at Brandeis University and the author of American Judaism.

“Hard times will promote consolidation,” Sarna said.

“Initially there will be great sorrow at the loss of this organization or that organization, but if we do it right, we will find that we are leaner and meaner.

“We will see significant efficiencies produced by this kind of downsizing.

“Though no one is unsympathetic to the people losing their jobs who have also done important work, when looked at from the Jewish community as a whole, there is a sense that we expanded a bit too rapidly and far too many organizations came into existence.”

This expansion bubble already has started to deflate, as some organizations have cut pre-emptively to make sure that despite any fundraising woes, at least their core mission would be carried out.

The Baltimore Hebrew University announced that it would become part of Towson State University, and the Philadelphia Jewish Archive Center said it would shut down in 2009 and its collection would become part of Temple University’s archive.

But the closing of CAJE, Sarna said, is perhaps the perfect example of what happens when an organization runs its course and does not adapt quickly enough.

When it was started some 35 years ago, CAJE essentially was a platform for young innovative Jewish educators to share what then were avant-garde ideas about Jewish education that were being given short shrift by the establishment.

As CAJE aged, Sarna said, it went from a cutting-edge innovator to more of an establishment organization in the world of supplementary Hebrew schools.

Meanwhile, a new crop of organizations emerged that included, among others, the Partnership for Jewish Education and RAVSAK: The Jewish Community Day School Network, as well as a resurgent Jewish Educational Services of North America.

Sarna said, “it is clear that we are going to see a consolidation in the world of Jewish education. With JESNA and PEJE so much better funded, it is not surprising that CAJE has to shut its doors. And it would be a mistake to say, ‘What a terrible setback for Jewish education.’”

The call for more mergers in the broader Jewish nonprofit world has become louder of late.

Presenters at a symposium on nonprofits and the economy sponsored by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation and Natan, an organization that helps young funders find innovative projects, encouraged those in attendance to consider whether their organizations could merge.

When the Jewish Funders Network met in December to discuss how to deal with the fallout from the huge losses taken by nonprofits in the Bernard Madoff scandal, it proposed coming up with a list of organizations open to merger to save the community money.

When the Orthodox Union convened the leaders of dozens of Jewish day schools, organizers pushed schools to consider how they could potentially consolidate parts of their course offerings, perhaps creating regional Advanced Placement courses run by several schools together instead of each school paying to run small classes on their own.

Most Jewish professionals and funders are loath now to publicly name organizations that they think should merge, but the American Jewish Congress is an easy example of a potential casualty of the financial crisis, those interviewed told JTA.