LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles-based chapter of the American Jewish Congress has split from the national organization and closed its office, citing long-standing differences over ideology, financial responsibility and personal leadership styles.
Present and past officers of the Pacific Southwest region of the AJCongress made the decision public at a news conference Monday, at the same time announcing the formation of a new organization, provisionally named the Progressive Jewish Alliance.
While regional leaders charged that the national leadership has turned away from the organization’s traditional liberalism, AJCongress Executive Director Phil Baum blamed the split solely on financial problems.
“The Los Angeles chapter simply hasn’t paid its way and we have been subsidizing them for years,” said Baum from his New York office. “All we ask of them is to pay their bills.”
Baum noted that the AJCongress chapters in St. Louis and Detroit had closed down during the past decade because of financial difficulties. He said he hoped to re-open the Los Angeles office under new leadership.
In San Francisco, Tracy Salkowitz, executive director of the Northern Pacific region of AJCongress, called the divorce “incredibly unfortunate,” adding that “the [L.A. office] has incredibly talented individuals.”
While Salkowitz’ office has no intentions of following its southern colleague, she said L.A.’s secession nonetheless affects her operation.
“We worked together in a number of areas, most particularly on legislative issues.”
The two offices collaborate to sponsor an annual leadership conference and are currently working on a state initiative to replace the dismantled federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act with a California law or constitutional amendment.
Salkowitz said she will continue to work with the new entity of the L.A. AJCongress as she does with a wide variety of community activist groups.
Discussing financial issues, Patsy Ostroy, president of the defunct regional chapter and interim president of the new progressive alliance, acknowledged that during 1998 her chapter, with 2,500 dues-paying members, had incurred a $70,000 deficit on a $280,000 budget.
Part of the financial problem lay in the difficulty of attracting support for a national organization that “didn’t stand for anything,” said the past regional president, Douglas Mirell.
That brought the news conference back to ideological confrontations, apparently fueled by differing attitudes between the East and West coasts, as well as personality clashes.
One major current point of friction is the possible emergence of an independent Palestinian state, supported in Los Angeles but opposed by national headquarters in New York, said Steven Kaplan, another former regional president.
Over the years, the two coasts of the AJCongress have also clashed over First Amendment rights, garment industry sweatshops, criminal justice and the integration of gays and lesbians, with those on the West Coast generally taking a more liberal stance than those on the East Coast.
Most of the regional leaders dated the differences with the national organization to the departure some five years ago of AJCongress Executive Director Henry Siegman.
But the confrontation has been building for a much longer time. Ten years ago, a similar separation from the national organization was seriously considered in Los Angeles.