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November 19, 2004/Kislev 6 5765, Vol. 57, No. 12
Wanted: a Jewish leadership pool
RACHEL POMERANCE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Lanny Lahr, current president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix this year, is no stranger to the position. He's held it before. And Shelley Cohn, who is president of the board of Hillel at Arizona State University, is also a past president of Hillel. Both are highly capable and widely admired. But the question emerges: Why are we recycling our leaders? Are there no new candidates to take on leadership roles within the Jew-ish community in Phoenix?
Two high-pro-file executive searches in the national Jewish community last spring ran into this same problem: the shallow pool of candidates for top jobs in Jewish organizations.
The six-month search to find a new CEO for this United Jewish Communities, the umbrella group of the federation system, centered on a handful of male directors of large federations. It was the same group visited for the job many times before.
And when Hillel sought a replacement for Richard Joel, its longtime CEO who took over the helm of Yeshiva University - whose own presidency search took nearly three years - the group ultimately hired an interim director while it kept looking.
Both searches speak volumes about the state of recruitment and retention in Jewish communal life, observers say. If prestigious, well-paying jobs at the helm of Jewish organizations struggle to attract personnel, what does that say about the prospects for drawing talent to mid- and entry-level positions?
Recent studies and interviews with JTA suggest that not enough is being done to draw young Jews to careers in Jewish organizations, nor is there adequate training, mentorship or compensation to keep them on a Jewish professional job track.
At stake is the current American Jewish organizational infrastructure, which depends on fresh volunteer and professional leadership as well as the potential for promising careers in Jewish communal service.
"If leadership development is a continuum of moving people through different stages," from the initial recruitment to motivating people to reach new levels of leadership, then "the whole system is a bit broken," said Laurie Blitzer, 40, a Jewish activist in New York, where she is a partner at the elite consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
There is "a lot of lip service about making room for young Jewish leaders, much more than it's actually happening," said Blitzer, founder of Kol Dor, Hebrew for Voice of a Generation, a new inter-national network to connect young Jewish leaders.
Hal Ossman, director of the Young Leadership Division of the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix, presents a somewhat rosier picture of leadership recruitment in the general Phoenix area. He calls developing new leaders "a priority of this community," and he cites organizations like Hillel and birthright israel, which he said have "rede-fined" themselves and are reaching more college-age students than ever before.
"While (lack of leadership) is certainly a worry," he said, "I think communities like Phoenix are doing a lot. And we're only going to invest more in that to make sure that we have leaders for the future. We have to."
According to Ossman, YLD programming in Phoenix reaches at least 1,000 young adults a year. And, he added, YLD members go on to leadership positions within the community.
Three YLD members are chairing the upcoming com-munitywide Mitzvah Day, to be held Dec. 5. Former YLD president Steven Schwarz moved on to become a vice president of the federation. And Ken Feldman, a YLD board member, is president of the board at Kivel Campus of Care.
Jennifer Schwarz, a member of the National Young Leadership Cabinet of United Jewish Communities who is married to Steven Schwarz, said that Phoenix has come a long way in the last several years. But she said that cultivating young Jewish leadership in Phoenix remains "extremely challenging. People are busy, disinterested, or simply uninformed about the opportunities for leadership in this community."
She believes that there needs to be more of an effort to court younger potential Jewish leaders. "Our community desperately needs to raise more money to invest substantially in this age group," she said, "to send people to young leadership conferences, to heavily subsidize missions to Israel and to properly market the wonderful opportunities that exist here for young people.
"We've seen on a small scale what can happen when we invest in our future leaders," Schwarz said. "We just need to find the resources to take this cultivation to the next level."
Several respected leader-ship programs do exist, including those run by the Wexner Foundation for North American Jewish profes-sionals and volunteers, as well as Israeli officials.
The Mandel Foundation sponsors programs to train Israeli civil servants and Jewish educators throughout the Diaspora. This year, it partnered with the UJC to create The Mandel Center for Leadership, which will recruit and train professional and volunteer leaders for North American Jewish federations.
There also is the Dorot Fellowship, which seeks to promote American Jewish lay leaders by sponsoring young American Jews for a year of Jewish study and community service in Israel.
There is a lot of talk these days about Jewish leadership, and the beginnings of serious action - particularly in the realm of boosting the reservoir of and rewards for Jewish professionals.
Among the new initiatives is the Professional Leaders Project, launched with $1 million apiece from Jewish philanthropists Lynn Schu-sterman, Michael Steinhardt and Bill Davidson.
The project - consisting of two surveys on Jewish professional leadership and two workshops to draw young Jews into Jewish jobs - found in its first survey a "persistent undersupply of well-trained and experienced Jewish educators and communal professionals." Reasons cited include low pay and status, tension between professionals and lay leaders and a lack of professional development.
Jewish communal leader-ship also is afflicted by a lack of professional standards and accountability, the survey found.
Those same reasons are believed to contribute to the steep attrition rate at Jewish organizations: Up to half of Jewish professionals at some organizations leave their jobs within five years, said the report, authored by sociologist Gary Tobin.
Another effort at redress comes from the UJC, which acknowledged a serious gender gap in its leadership ranks: Federations largely are staffed by women, but few - including none of the 20 largest federations - are led by them.
The UJC, along with a group called Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community, commissioned a research and action plan earlier this year to crack the glass ceiling.
For Hannah Rosenthal, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs - the only female head of a major Jewish organization that isn't specifically oriented toward women - the issue has personal relevance.
"I have two daughters, and whether I would encourage them to go into Jewish communal life is still an unanswered question," she said. "I want them to know financial independence. I want them to figure out a successful and efficient way to make the world better."
According to Rabbi David Silber, dean of New York's Drisha Institute for Jewish Education, the Jewish com-munity is "paying the price of telling our kids ... we want them to be doctors and law-yers."
But there are other factors.
"Leaders burn out," said Art Paikowsky, a consultant for nonprofits who headed the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix for more than five years and worked for federations in Washington and Philadelphia.
Fund raising amid a growing number of competing charities - including cam-paigns run by the federation's own agencies - can be a pressured and thankless job, he said.
Others bemoan the task of rallying independent-minded constituents.
"Being an exec in the federation system is a job that requires skills that are common among cat herders," joked Jon Friedenberg, former head of the Jewish Federation of Greater San Jose in California.
Leading a federation is "not perhaps as simple and straightforward as other kinds of positions that are equivalent in terms of salary and stature," he said.
Some who leave "can excel in other environments that are perhaps simultaneously less demanding on family and emotional energy, and yet more rewarding - or at least as rewarding - from a career standpoint," said Friedenberg, who now is president of the El Camino Hospital Foundation.
According to Tobin's report, "'burnout' is understandably epidemic when there is no system in place to address the problems which arise from working in complex and demanding community set-tings."
One key to retaining professionals is providing mentorship and a career path that gives them skills to take on top jobs, observers say.
For Matt Grossman, 33, the new executive director of the B'nai B'rith Youth Organi-zation, that's what has kept him on his career path.
"I've had the good fortune of having unbelievable mentors throughout my entire career in the Jewish community, and I don't know if I would be here without those mentors," said Grossman, who worked nine years for Hillel.
Zev Hymovitz, a longtime Jewish professional and co-author with Tobin of the professional development sur-vey, said some Jewish groups invest in professional develop-ment, while others do not.
"I think it's going to take time before they really make it into a priority issue," he said. "Many of them are involved in trying to keep their organizations afloat."
But Hymovitz is optimistic.
"It's the national organi-zations that need to take the leadership in this and to try to do it nationwide," he said, "and I think they are."
This is the second in a four-part series. Staff Writer Deborah Sussman Susser contributed to this article.
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