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February 18, 2005/Adar 1 9 5765, Volume 57, No. 25
Anti-Israel report stands
YWCA national board fails to condemn Witness Report
DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER
Associate Editor
The YWCA of the USA's National Coordinating Board (NCB), which met in Phoenix from Feb. 11-13, failed to pass a statement condemning the 2004 Witness Report, a four-page account of a visit that 14 members of the World YWCA made to the Middle East last spring.
That report detailed a visit to Yasser Arafat at his compound in Ramallah and concluded that Israelis were trying to "rid the land of Palestinians" just as "Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews."
Arafat, who died Nov. 11, was the leader of the Palestinian Authority.
The YWCA of the USA is a member of the World YWCA. The YWCA of the USA is made up of local associations that are organized into regions, such as the Southwest Delta Region, to which the Maricopa County YWCA belongs.
The statement condemning the report had been adopted and put forward to the NCB by the Pacific Region of the YWCA, which includes Tucson.
Janet Marcotte, executive director of the Tucson YWCA, said the Witness Report "has been a concern to our organization for a long time. I'm surprised it hasn't come up sooner."
Sharon Bettinelli, executive director of the YWCA Berkeley, in California, echoed Marcotte's concerns. "I'm on the executive committee, so we had been dealing with this for a while," she told Jewish News by phone the day after the NCB voted against the Pacific Region's statement.
In anticipation of the NCB meeting in Phoenix on Feb. 13, Bettinelli sent the 30 members of her board copies of the Pacific Region's statement as well as the Witness Report.
"I wanted to make sure our board members knew about it," she said, "because it was very important for us to separate ourselves from what was going on. ... We have quite a number of Jewish people involved here, and we don't want them to think in any way that we support this. 'They' are 'we.' That's why it was so important for so many of us out here to try to make sure that this resolution was passed at the meetings in Phoenix."
Five members of the NCB voted for the statement, and 11 voted against. There was one abstaining vote.
According to several YWCA members and observers who attended the meeting, the substance of the statement was not discussed; after it was voted down, it was referred to the YWCA's World Relations Committee for further study.
A prior statement from the Southwest Delta Region denouncing the Witness Report was voted down and referred to the same committee at a meeting of the NCB in November. According to participants at the Feb. 13 meeting, the committee has taken no action on the Southwest Delta Region's statement.
Marcotte said she found the results of the Feb. 13 vote "astounding. Anybody outside the organization would be distressed to see that given what we say we stand for as an organization, we didn't pass this very frankly inoffensive statement and make it the policy of the YWCA of the USA."
Authored by Doris Pagelkopf, vice president of the World YWCA and the American representative on the World YWCA board, the Witness Report reads in part: "I strongly felt the correlation to World War II. During that war Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews and now a group of Israelis ... is trying to choke off and rid the land of Palestinians."
The report was distributed to members of the World Relations Committee by Pagelkopf, who is a member of that committee, and included in a link in the newsletter of the YWCA of the USA, which is where Barbara Lewkowitz, then executive director of the YWCA of Maricopa County, came across it last summer.
Lewkowitz and Maricopa County YWCA board member Abbie Beller had already been alarmed by what both described as a "lack of balance" in a resolution brought before the World YWCA by the YWCA of Palestine at a meeting in Brisbane, Australia, in 2003, which both Lewkowitz and Beller attended. The 2003 resolution called for "an end to Israeli military aggression" as well as "the immediate withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq."
The YWCA of the USA was the only national body to vote against the 2003 resolution, which was adopted by the World YWCA.
Lewkowitz, who was first interviewed by the Jewish News in November, after she resigned her position, said at the time, "I thought the resolution was untenable, but I was even more offended by the (Witness) Report."
According to Lewkowitz, she mailed a copy of the report to the members of the executive committee of the local YWCA and received no response. She said that she also asked to have the issue put on the agenda for the August board meeting and that it was not.
At that meeting, Beller resigned in protest. Interviewed by Jewish News in November, Beller expressed dismay that the board of the Maricopa County YWCA "didn't take the situation more seriously." At least one other board member later resigned as well. In her letter of resignation, a copy of which was obtained by Jewish News, she noted she was unable to reconcile her own views with the World YWCA's initiatives regarding Palestine, Israel and Iraq.
Connie Robinson, president of the YWCA of Maricopa County board of directors, said she did not attend the Feb. 13 session at which the Pacific Region's statement opposing the Witness Report was presented.
Reached by telephone the following day, Robinson said that she had not seen the statement and had no opinion on it. Asked for comment on the Witness Report, she said that she had none and that she had not read it in its entirety. She also declined to comment on the resolution on the Middle East passed by the World YWCA in 2003, saying, "I don't have anything in front of me right now. I need to refresh my memory and I don't have anything to refer to," and added that she had other priorities.
Prior to the NCB meeting this past weekend, the directors of the Jewish Community Relations Councils of the Jewish federations in both Phoenix and Tucson, in conjunction with the YWCA of Tucson, invited Peggy Sanchez Mills, the CEO of the YWCA of the USA, and members of the YWCA's national board to meet with members of the Jewish community while they were in Phoenix for the NCB gathering.
Josh Protas, director of the Southern Arizona JCRC, said that Sanchez Mills declined to meet in person, but offered to arrange a conference call.
Both Protas and Michelle Steinberg, director of the Greater Phoenix JCRC, declined to participate in a conference call, saying in a joint statement, "We believe that a face-to-face meeting is required to begin a meaningful and productive dialogue about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and have offered to meet at a future time and place that is convenient for the leadership of the YWCA of the USA."
According to Steinberg, she tried unsuccessfully several times to arrange a meeting with Robinson and other board members of the local YWCA in the month preceding the NCB meeting.
Robinson and a small number of local YWCA board members met on Feb. 9 with President Ken Smith and Executive Director Rabbi Robert Kravitz of The American Jewish Committee regarding, in Kravitz's words, "the misunderstandings and the difficulties in (Robinson's) planning for her upcoming event."
That event is the Tribute to Women, the local YWCA's major fund-raising lunch, to be held March 2. Kravitz told Jewish News that Robinson called the AJC at the urging of one of the honorees.
Kravitz described the meeting with Robinson and her board members as "a very frank meeting of the minds, and I think the result will be positive. They told us that they would be publishing two advertisements, one in the Jewish News and one in the Arizona Republic, indicating their position."
The ad published in this week's Jewish News does not mention the Witness Report that is denounced by the statements from the Southwest Delta and Pacific regions.
Eileen Mershant, one of two NCB representatives from the Great Lakes Region who voted for the Pacific Region statement on Feb. 13, said that she did so because "it was a fairly straightforward request to simply say that the comments in the Witness Report made last summer do not reflect the views of the YWCA of the USA. And I don't believe they do."
Asked why the statement was defeated, she sighed. "I wish I had a simple answer and I don't," she said finally. "I have a feeling other things entered into it that I'm not sure I understand, because it seems pretty straightforward to me."
Mershant wondered if perhaps the voting members didn't "refresh their memories on the content of the Witness Report" prior to voting. "I have looked at (the Witness Report) again," she said, "and it was terribly one-sided. It just simply would have been a far clearer thing to say this does not represent the views of the YWCA of the USA and make that a clear, unequivocal statement."
Mershant added her concern that because the Witness Report initially came through the World Relations Committee, which is a committee of the YWCA of the USA, "it could appear that the World Relations Committee was endorsing it."
Asked whether the World Relations Committee from which the Witness Report originally came is the same committee to which the Southwest Delta and Pacific Region statements have been returned for review, Mershant allowed that it was.
"That makes your head wonder a bit," she said. "It's kind of circular."
The resolution is scheduled to be revisited at the NCB's next meeting, in April, in Washington, D.C.
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