September 16, 2008

By HAVIV RETTIG

When the Jewish Agency ceded aliya activities in North America to Nefesh B'Nefesh, it didn't lose all that much in organizational terms.

Only a handful of agency employees work in North American aliya, fewer than a dozen on each side of the Atlantic. Nefesh is perhaps five times larger in staff and organized in a way that makes more sense to the American oleh.

Though little has been lost institutionally, the agency may have surrendered the beating heart of its perceived mission, a matter of life or death for an organization that lives on donations from North American Jewish communities. With the agency no longer managing aliya for the 80 percent of the Diaspora represented by North American Jewry, the average Jew is justified in wondering why it should continue to exist.

It is worth noting that the agency's primary functions, in terms of organizational size and focus, have long been coordinating partnerships between Israeli and Diaspora communities, managing large social welfare projects in Israel, and providing a Jewish world infrastructure for small communities worldwide.

While community partnerships and social projects would exist even without a Jewish Agency, it is the last function - the network of emissaries in small communities who are instrumental in rescuing Jews in times of crisis - that even the agency's most energetic detractors acknowledge would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

That's why this part of its activities has formed in recent days a growing part of the organization's public relations. It is a quintessentially governmental function, in the sense that it is as uneconomical as it is necessary. Hundreds of Georgian Jews who suddenly found themselves in the path of Russian tank columns were grateful to discover agency emissaries looking for them, offering them aid and, for those who wished, a ticket to Israel.

There is something silly in the establishment of a new forum for coordinating these activities with the government. Such a forum already existed, and was unused. Agency Chairman Ze'ev Bielski and Cabinet Secretary Ovad Yehezkel know each other's cellphone numbers, while much of the coordinating takes place in the field.

The new forum, rather, is about rebranding the agency away from aliya. It is about training the Jewish world to think of the organization primarily as an aid to Jewish communities in need, one of the few functions that cannot be privatized.