In suing the Jewish Community Federation, Rabbi Pinchas Lipner is biting the hand that feeds him.
Hebrew Academy wouldn’t have built its present home and wouldn’t have continued to operate if it weren’t for San Francisco’s JCF.
The academy has never been able to charge enough tuition to come close to covering its annual costs. Most of its students are emigres who have attended on scholarship.
Many graduates have gone to some of the nation’s best universities. Had they given back more to their alma mater, Hebrew Academy might not be in such a financial squeeze.
Unlike other top private high schools, Hebrew Academy has no sizable endowment. Instead it has found itself in an ever-deepening financial crisis — a crisis that only promises to get worse now that there is another Jewish high school in San Francisco competing for students.
Meanwhile, federations across the country are cutting back allocations to all of their agencies because of the troubled economy. For Lipner to blame such cutbacks as well as a lack of other private contributions on some caustic comments Richard Goldman made in 1992 seems ridiculous and hardly the basis for a lawsuit.
Goldman made his comments as part of an oral history project funded by the JCF and its Jewish Community Endowment Fund. Although Goldman was a president of JCF in the early ’80s, the off-the-cuff remarks he made a decade later were his personal opinions, and nothing more.
Hebrew Academy continued to get federation funding long after Goldman’s 1992 remarks. So what damage did Goldman’s remarks cause? None we can see.
On top of that, hardly anyone in the Bay Area has ever seen Goldman’s opinions. Very few copies of the oral history exist; one is housed at U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, and another is at the federation building in San Francisco under lock and key. Can that really be considered a public document?
The Hebrew Academy must learn the sad facts that other Jewish agencies are learning: They can’t depend solely on the federation to stay afloat.
In these times, all agencies must do their own fund-raising if they wish to survive. Damages from a lawsuit do not qualify as fund-raising.
But that — along with the other issues — is for the courts to decide.