WASHINGTON — In years past, the New Israel Fund may have been “the Jewish community’s best kept liberal secret,” Franklin Fisher, its president, recently observed. That’s no longer the case.
For the first time since its founding in 1979 by a handful of San Franciscans to help support progressive nonprofit groups in Israel, the New Israel Fund has waded directly into Jewish politics, thus raising its profile in the American Jewish community.
While the group has worked for many years on the issue of religious pluralism by funding and assisting groups that promote dialogue between religious and secular Israelis, it never before had waged an aggressive advertising campaign on the issue as it did last year.
Doing so has been good for business. Last year, NIF raised $17.4 million, up 35 percent from 1996. The increase was accompanied by a surge in NIF’s donor base, which received money from 8,000 new donors. The net gain in donors was 6,000, bringing the total number of contributors up to 17,000.
NIF officials attribute the surge in giving to the concerns held by non-Orthodox Jews about the religious parties’ attempts to codify Orthodox control over religious life in Israel. Many American Jews were angered last year by the introduction of legislation in the Knesset that would deny recognition to conversions performed in Israel by non-Orthodox rabbis.
NIF officials, however, say their advertising campaign was not launched with dollar signs in mind. “There is no question that we have profited financially and in terms of visibility from making these issues public, but that was not the impetus that led to the campaign,” says Norman Rosenberg, the group’s executive director since 1990.
In a recent interview from his K Street office, Rosenberg says NIF decided, after much discussion, to take a public stand on the conversion bill because many Israelis said they needed help from diaspora Jews to win the religious pluralism battle. The belief that American Jews needed to know what was happening in Israel also played into the decision, he says.
“The first time that we chose to take what we think of as a public policy position was around this religious freedom debate…because for the first time we see this not as an issue for Israelis only,” he says. “This, in our judgment, is an issue of Jewish peoplehood.”
While the newspaper ads warning that Israel’s democracy is in danger of becoming a theocracy of the fervently religious and saying that Christians have more freedom of religion in Israel than Jews may have helped NIF raise money, they also drew criticism from some supporters of the group, including several Washington–area rabbis.
Rabbi Jack Moline of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria criticized NIF and its ads for inflaming the conflict between religious and secular Israelis and trying to profit from the serious rift among Judaism’s various streams.
Rosenberg says people concerned with the ads feel that publicly discussing these issues somehow damages the Jewish people.
“Even though these ads were directed at the community and even though every American Jew was talking about these issues privately, when you make the issue public…you add a dimension to it that makes many American Jews feel uncomfortable,” says Rosenberg, a lawyer who worked on behalf of the homeless and mentally disabled before coming to NIF.
“I think [the ads] came to the line, to be sure, but I know that some people believe they crossed the line,” he adds. “For that I have feelings of regret. That was not what we hoped to do.”
Despite taking a strong stand in the religious pluralism debate, NIF has no intention of becoming a public policy group, says Rosenberg, who stresses that NIF is a nonpartisan, non-political group dedicated to promoting progressive causes in Israel.
Although NIF has provided money over the years to groups that promote equality and peaceful coexistence among Jews and Arabs, it does not take a position on the peace process.
However, critics on the right say the group’s funding of liberal causes is political and has hampered Israel’s ability to fight terrorism.
These critics helped put an end to a joint program that NIF and the Smithsonian were planning to celebrate Israel’s 50th birthday.
In news releases and letters to the Smithsonian, supporters of groups such as Americans for A Safe Israel depicted NIF as a “far-left-wing organization” planning a program that would attack Israel and Zionism. The Smithsonian eventually cancelled the joint program.
Rosenberg rejects the criticism of the program, saying that NIF’s backers are ardent Zionists. “We can out-Zionist any member of AFSI.”
Herbert Zweibon, AFSI’s chairman, says NIF supports not only centers for battered women or rape victims, but also organizations such as the Association of Civil Rights in Israel .
Zweibon says the group has undermined Israel’s efforts to fight terrorism by launching legal efforts in support of those suspected of terrorist activities or of supporting terrorist organizations.
NIF also supports various human rights organizations that have criticized Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, including Amnesty International and B’Tselem.