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ance through their jobs. So who
needs B'nai B'rith?
All of that is true, and yet
there is something poignantly at-
tractive about B'nai B'rith.
It isn't an organization that
bows and scrapes to please a
handful of big givers, like most
of the more prosperous groups.
B'nai B'rith has always been an
organization of ordinary people
— small shopkeepers, insurance
agents, lawyers who don't belong
to the glamorous New York
firms, sales reps, bookkeepers,
corporate and government bu-
reaucrats who live in modest
tract houses, who drive Ford
Tauruses, not Mercedes and Ac-
curas.
"It's an organization for aver-
age people," said Deborah Lakin,
a delegate from Boston. "It's a
group that allows average people
to become part of something won-
derful."
Delegates this week honored
the group's young leadership —
an obvious sore point with B'nai
B'rith, given its inability to at-
tract enough younger Jews to en-
sure its survival.

B'nai B'rith is a
personal
organization in an
era of franchised
corporate
philanthropy.

But B'nai B'ritlytioesn't treat
its up-and-coming leaders as
just so much financial fodder —
future big-givers, to be coddled
and feted and nudged until
those big donations start flow-
ing, the young leadership mod-
el that's become standard
throughout the Jewish world. At
least not yet.
"What distinguishes B'nai
B'rith is a strong sense of fami-
ly, and a burning desire to help
those who can't help themselves
— and not just by writing
checks," said Jack Berkowitz,
one of the young leadership hon-
orees on Sunday, who insists
that the service ideal will come
back into fashion as government
programs dry up and people
start to see real suffering in their
own neighborhoods.
Ask 10 delegates to the Wash-
ington convention what distin-
guishes their organization from
all the others, and after you fil-
ter out all the usual organiza-
tional catch phrases — "the
diversity of our programs," for
example, or "the continuity cri-
sis" — you keep hearing the
word "service."
B'nai B'rith is, in its heart of
hearts, a great big service orga-
nization, an international ver-
sion of the type of group that
used to be part of the landscape

of every American small town,
every urban community.
They may talk about legisla-
tion in Washington, but what
they're really proudest of are
their housing facilities for seniors,
the service projects by local
lodges — now called "units" in an
attempt to sound a little less
stodgy — the food deliveries to
local families on Rosh Hashanah.
B'nai B'rith, despite its size, is
a personal organization in an era
of franchised corporate philan-
thropy.
It's also a group that sees a
personal connection between
Jews in New York and Havana
and Sarajevo and Moscow, not
just an abstract need to support
Jews in distant places. There's a
feeling of personal responsibility
that Jews used to think about
when they could remember the
Old Country, and when their ex-
perience in the new one wasn't
altogether serene.
All of this, of course, is dis-
tinctly out of fashion.
Checkbook activism has be-
come the norm because a new
generation of Jews no longer feels
the urgency of direct service, or
the sense of personal responsi-
bility for Jews — here and abroad
— in less fortunate circum-
stances.
Jewish organizations have
taken on a colorless, unvarying
style, with differences between
groups obliterated by the profes-
sional fund-raisers and the cor-
porate image-makers; activism,
increasingly, is detached from ac-
tivity, except for the activity of
answering solicitations and send-
ing in money.
Yet the camaraderie, the fra-
ternal joys of the old B'nai B'rith
and the unglamorous service eth-
ic are what make the organiza-
tion distinct, and what make it
such an important part of the
lives of the people — young and
old — who gathered in Wash-
ington last weekend.
That's the essential dilemma
for B'nai B'rith: to survive into
the next century, it must join the
parade of issue-oriented, fund-
raising-obsessed Jewish organi-
zations fighting for attention.
But the more it does that, the
more it risks losing what makes
B'nai B'rith different, and be-
coming just one more generic, all-
purpose Jewish organization in
an already overcrowded field.
B'nai B'rith's current reorga-
nization plan — eliminating dis-
trict offices, opening new, smaller
regional ones, giving potential
members different ways to affil-
iate beyond the old local lodges
— represents a troubled, last-
ditch effort to find that balance.
The search for that middle
ground, the underlying theme to
this week's convention, may
prove elusive. And if that hap-
pens, the Jewish community will
lose a vital part of its communal
soul. ❑