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reign, the Neighborhood
Project grew to a level of
serving over 500 families in
the Southfield and Oak
Park areas.
There was the move of
Federation headquarters
from 163 Madison in Detroit
to the Max Fisher Building
in Bloomfield Hills. Then,
there were the more urgent
and decisive moves that had
to be made. Mr. Schlussel
had a direct hand in the re-
vamping of the Jewish
Home for Aged, the Agency
for Jewish Education and
the survival of Sinai Hospi-
tal.
He became a community-
wide leader when the Per-
sian Gulf War and the
attacks on Israel by Iraq put
him in the media spotlight.
But beyond all of these is-
sues, Mr. Schlussel gets his
work done behind the
scenes. He opens doors, as-
sesses situations and gets
them changed, even if
change, such as AJE, isn't
always popular. But as Mr.
Page indicated, he didn't
force change; instead he
brought key players togeth-
er to effect change.
"I think one of the re-
markable things about his
presidency was the fact that
we did deal with an inordi-
nate number of thorny and
seemingly unresolvable
communal issues and Mark
had a knack of not running
from these issues," said
Robert Aronson, Federa-
tion's executive vice presi-
dent. "Even though people
were sometimes unhappy
with the way things were re-
solved, they couldn't say
they didn't get a fair hear-
ing.
"Mark was not an ap-
peaser," continued Mr.
Aronson. "He was not afraid
of conflict. None of us wants
to be in a position where
people don't like us. He was
not a backroom politician
who would ice everything
and then get opinion. He
went right to the board, to
the people for their input."
I am one who believes,
quite frankly, that inter-
marriage is now a fact of life
in our community. We can
pound our chests and wring
our hands about it, but we
set into motion all of the fac-
tors which have led our chil-
dren to reach beyond the
Jewish community. We must
work with every fiber of our

being to invite those whc
have intermarried to become
Jews of choice and welcome
them and what they can
bring to our community with
open arms. We must not be
intimidated by those who
choose to bury their head in
the sands and deny the
ality of the crisis which we
presently face.
"When I took this office,
my perception was that Fed-
eration was at a crossroads,"
said Mr. Schlussel. "Feder-
ation had to look within it-
self and re-vitalize and
re-evaluate and re-establish
itself in a pre-eminent role
of the Detroit Jewish com-
munity. That all sounds
very nice and official. But it

"You wouldn't run
your own business
the way we've run
Federation in the
past. We came to
a point where like
anywhere else,
we're rewarding
competence and
eliminating
incompetence"

— Mark Schlussel

really had to be done. That
meant realizing that we
could not go on fiscally the
way we had been operating.
That meant asking agency
heads to hold the line or cut
back."
In plain terms, it meant
that Federation wanted to
know why an agency such as
Home for the Aged was hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars
off its budget. In the past,
Federation could absorb the
budgetary miscalculations.
Mr. Schlussel was saying,
"no more."
"You wouldn't run your
own business the way we've
run Federation in the past,"
he said. "We came to a point
where like anywhere else,
we're rewarding competence
and eliminating incompe-
tence."
Mr. Schlussel engineered
the Federation's recent
strategic plan to help the
agency plan for its future fi-
nancial needs. He also
helped create the Michigan
Jewish Conference, an or-
ganization that links Jew-
ish communities all over the
state with Detroit's.
I was told recently by one