Don’t bother making a phone call to the American Jewish Congress’ San Francisco office. At the behest of the AJCongress’ governing body, the telephone has been disconnected and, as of two weeks ago, the Northern Pacific branch office on Market Street has been cleared out. That much is certain.
What remains unclear is, quite simply, why?
National leaders say the San Francisco office was a financial albatross that strained the organization’s budget.
Local leaders, however, claim the governing body jettisoned one of its more liberal outposts in an attempt to move farther to the ideological right.
“They’ve closed several offices over the last few years, and simultaneously closed the Florida office when they closed us,” said Fred Blum, AJCongress Northern Pacific regional co-president. “I think it’s not a coincidence that Florida and San Francisco were two of the areas that were politically to the left of the organization. I think there’s a desire by people in national to move to the right.”
Yet, when asked if the closure of the San Francisco office was due to anything other than financial concerns, Phil Baum, the AJCongress national executive director, replied with a curt and emphatic “no!” “Oh God, we’ve been carrying them for years! Year after year, we’ve been imploring them to get it together and pay their bills. They’re a very active office and have been doing good work for years but the local people weren’t willing to pay their own bills,” said the New York-based Baum. “They’ve always carried a major deficit accrued from their being unwilling or unable to raise money. They were engaged in social service work and didn’t like to ask people for money. It was beneath them to ask for money.” A watchdog and activist organization specializing in First Amendment issues and the separation of church and state, AJCongress now has eight regional offices in addition to its New York headquarters. The Los Angeles office will now oversee the entire Pacific region as well as Nevada, Arizona and Idaho, with Gary Ratner as regional executive director.
Ratner said the San Francisco branch and the national organization had faced a parting of the ways. While the national organization wanted to focus attention and expenditures in California on cultivating relationships with the Latino and Asian communities as well as monitor the implementation of President Bush’s faith-based charities plan, the San Francisco office was instead committed to its own projects.
“We’re embarking on some major new programs and the people who were in San Francisco just didn’t go along with what we were attempting to do,” Ratner said. “They’re all very good programs, and we support them. But we’re just moving in a different direction.”
The possibility of the San Francisco office’s closure became real when Tracy Salkowitz, regional executive director since 1993, left her post in November.
Baum claims that the San Francisco branch office lacked the funds to hire a new executive director, and, two months ago, he contacted the office and gave an ultimatum: Make a commitment to paying your own bills or else. He said the office chose “or else.”
“The office was unwilling to give a commitment. Each office is required to pay its own expenses, and it’s not worth it for the people of Dallas [another regional office] to pay for San Francisco,” Baum said.
Salkowitz, however, says the governing body engineered the San Francisco office’s fiscal woes by purposely failing to heed her advice.
“When I left, I recommended they hire a development director. Traditionally, we brought in about 80 percent of our income in the last three months of the year. I told them that if we didn’t hire a development director, the region would end the year with a mammoth deficit,” said Salkowitz, now the director of planning for the Alameda County social services department. “By deciding to not hire a development director, they set in motion the closing of the office. This, in my mind, was done with great intent. We’ve been a thorn in their side, and they viewed this as a great opportunity.”
Blum added that the national office never gave a firm time line for fulfilling their demand for a financial commitment, rendering it impossible to seal an agreement. He strongly maintained the San Francisco office was not consistently drowning in red ink, though Baum’s claim “sounds good for the media.”
Due to what he called “creative accounting,” Blum said that when he donated his own money, he was told “it didn’t count” because he was an AJCongress national officer. Similarly, donations from the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay were also discounted, he said.
He added that much of AJCongress’ Bay Area work would be continued through the now-independent Jack Berman Foundation. And he does not discount the possibility of a reconciliation.
“Who knows?” he said. “Arabs and Jews are talking, Palestinians and Israelis are talking. I assume we can talk to them, and hopefully with better luck.”