32

Friday, May 23, 1986

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

The largest single item in the Youth Aliya
budget — and the second largest in the en-
tire Agency budget — is $33.8 million for
subsidizing boarding school education for
some 12,700 Israeli-born teenagers from
problematic social and family backgrounds.
This group of disadvantaged youth com-
prises 70 per cent of those served by Youth
Aliya. Since 1971 the department has in-
vested its resources mainly in this group,
and has financed an expensive boarding
school education for some 13,000 teenagers
each year since the late 1970s.

Who has decided, and according to what
criteria, that Israel "needs" Youth Aliya to
provide a boarding school education for
12,700 teenagers for the coming year? I put
this question to several senior welfare and
education officials in the Israeli govern-
ment. None of them had the faintest idea
how the Jewish Agency had arrived at the
12,700 figure. They agreed, however, that
Israel has more of its teenagers in boarding
schools — better than 20 percent more
than any other western country — and
that the time has come to look for other

What is the Jewish Agency?

The Jewish Agency was created in
1929 as a framework for prominent and
wealthy Jews, who did not identify as
Zionists, to contribute to the building of
a Jewish national home in Palestine. The
existence of such a body was deemed
necessary by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, then
president of the World Zionist Organiza-
tion, as a way to broaden the base of
political and financial support for the
goal of eventually establishing a Jewish
state.
By the time Israel was established in
1948, the Jewish Agency and the WZO
had merged for all practical purposes.
Since that time, world Jewry has con-
tributed over $8 billion to Israel through
the Agency. These funds are collected in
the U.S. by the United Jewish Appeal
and in other countries by Keren Hayesod,
the overseas equivalent of UJA.
In 1971, a new arrangement concern-
ing the tasks and structure of the
Agency/WZO was worked out between
the heads of the WZO, who are primar-
ily Israeli political leaders, and the
leaders of the main fundraising bodies
abroad. The Agency and the WZO were
formally separated and the two groups of
leaders worked out a new system for joint
governance of the Agency, based on the
principal of Israel-Diaspora partnership.
Under this new arrangement, called the
"reconstitution" of the Jewish Agency,
the Agency took responsibility for work
carried out in Israel in the areas of rural
settlement, care of immigrants, educa-
tion, youth training, housing and later,
urban revitalization under Project Re-
newal. The WZO took on the tasks of
Zionist and Jewish education for the
Diaspora, Zionist political activity
abroad, and the promotion of aliya
(immigration) from the free countries of
the west. In recent years there has been
some overlap as the Agency too began to
fund Jewish education programs for the
Diaspora.

Where Do All Our Dollars Go?

Of all UJA funds collected in local com-
munities, an average of 60 percent goes
to Israel through the Jewish Agency. The
Agency's budget for 1986/87 comes to
$429 million, about 80 percent from the
UJA and the rest from Keren Hayesod.
The WZO's budget comes to $59 million
for the coming year, with $29 million pro-
vided by Keren Hayesod and $30 million
by the Israeli government. The govern-
ment also provides a supplementary
budget for the WZO to carry out settle-
ment activities in the occupied territories
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Agency is governed by a three-
tiered structure: at the apex is the Ex-
ecutive, composed of the heads of the
Agency departments and leaders of the
Diaspora fund-raising bodies, which is
charged with the day-to-day running of
the organizaton; then comes the 74-
member Board of Governors, charged
with policy making and supervision of
Agency activities; and last the Assem-
bly, the constituent body of the Agency,
half of whose members are designated by
the WZO, 30 percent by the United Israel
Appeal (which channels UJA funds to the
Agency) and 20 percent by Keren Hay-
esod. The leading figures in this structure
are the chairman of the Agency Execu-
tive, who is also the chairman of the
WZO Executive; and the chairman of the
Board of Governors.
The Agency is thus a main arena of
Israel-Diaspora relations. But it is also
an extension of the Israeli political
system, by virtue of the fact that half of
its governing bodies and virtually all of
its key executive posts are controlled by
leaders of political parties of the WZO,
which in turn reflects to a large degree
the balance of forces in the Knesset.
Since 1971, the Diaspora leaders have
found that the formal "partenership" in
the governance of the Agency is skewed
in practical tems in favor of the political
leaders of the WZO.

solutions to their problems. A growing
number of Jewish leaders in the Diaspora
who serve on the governing bodies of the
Agency have also reached this conclusion.
There are sound professional grounds for
questioning the need for such an extensive
program of residential education. Further-
more, some of the needs served by this
Youth Aliya program are political, and can
be traced back to the interests of the par-
ties and organizations in the World Zionist
Organization and in the government coali-
tion. This is but one expression of the ef-
fects of the partnership between Diaspora
Jewry and the parties of the WZO on the
policies and priorities of the Jewish Agen-
cy (see box).
Even the head of the Youth Aliya De-
partment, Uri Gordon, could not explain
what needs had led his department to pro-
vide places in boarding schools for 12,700
youths. The number of places is deter-
mined by the money available in the bud-
get, he said, and is not based on any cur-
rent comprehensive assessment of the
needs of Israel's disadvantaged youth. In
effect, the $33.8 million allotted in the
budget is based on.the fact that a similar
sum was allotted last year, and the year
before that and so on. The amounts in-
vested in this program began to rise after
1971, when the government and the Agen-
cy decided that most of the department's
budget would serve the needs of this group.
Since 1971, roughly $300 million has been
spent by the Agency on boarding school
education for disadvantaged youth.
Today, Gordon admitted, budgetary al-
locations for this service are not coor-
dinated with the education and welfare
ministries of the government, which also
fund boarding school solutions for problem
youth, although on a much more limited
scale. Nor has there been any such coor-
dination for several years. He conceded
that perhaps it was time to re-examine the
task conferred on Youth Aliya in 1971, in
the context of a joint government-Agency
effort to assess overall needs for boarding
school education.
Even admitting the need for a reassess-
ment is a major step for Youth Aliya,
which has been notoriously defensive
about criticism of Israel's unique system
of residential education. Any move to re-
evaluate, though, faces not only the en-
trenched professional interests of the
departmental staff, for whom the impor-
tance of residential education is primary,
but also resistance from various political
parties and other public bodies whose own
interests would be threatened by a signifi-
cant reduction in the scope of Youth Aliya
funding for the boarding schools that they
own and operate.
An objective reassessment would also re-
veal that Youth Aliya has strayed some-
what from its original ideological goals.
That would be painful for its staff and

