Metro
They'll Take Manhattan
Jewish communal leaders David and Nancy Gad-Harf eye career shifts.
HARRY KI RS BAUM
SteqrWriter
I is her turn. Flashback to 1988:
David Gad-Harf, then head of the
Jewish Community Relations
Council in St. Louis, lands a job in
Detroit as executive director of the
Jewish Community Council.
David's wife of nine years, Nancy,
leaves her career as a women's division
director at the Jewish Federation in St.
Louis to follow her husband to Detroit
with their 7-year-old son, Josh, in tow.
She becomes program development
director at Temple Israel in West
Bloomfield for 8 1 /, years before becom-
ing director of the American Technion
Society (ATS) East Central Region,
which consists of Detroit and
Pittsburgh.
Now, after 7 1 /, years, she will become
director of the ATS New York
Metropolitan Region starting in August.
David, after a 17-year career at the helm
of the JCCouncil, will follow her to the
East Coast.
"Detroit has really been more of a
home than any place else I've lived," said
Nancy, who grew up on Long Island.
"This is very bittersweet."
The ATS has begun an executive
search to fill the Detroit position; assis-
tant director Jo Rosen will become act-
ing regional director if the position has
not been filled by July 1.
The JCCouncifs search committee is
chaired by its immediate past president,
Steven Silverman, but David's last day is
not certain, so no interim director has
been picked. He plans to be on the job
until mid-July and then pursue job
options in New York.
Each Gad-Harf has left a mark on the
Detroit Jewish community: Nancy for
her fund-raising and organizational
skills, and David for his consensus-
building style in cultivating relationships
between the Jewish and non-Jewish
communities and for getting the
Council's message out.
Nancy And The ATS
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6/ 2
2005
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Since Nancy started at the ATS, the East
Central Region expanded to include a
Cleveland office. The region has raised
$62.4 million, or 80 percent of a 10-
year campaign goal of $78 million that
When she leaves, Nancyh said she
feels the East Central office is in good
shape. "Whoever comes in as a regional
director will not have to skip a beat," she
said. "It's an organization that can func-
tion well without me."'
The fund-raising stakes are higher in
New York — $186 million — but the
basic goal is the same: "to inspire a sense
of passion about the Technion and the
role it plays in building the State of
Israel and ensuring Israel's future," she
said.
Consensus-builder
Nancy and David
Gad-Haif
ends Sept. 30, 2006. Of that amount,
Detroit raised $33 million under
Nancy's guidance.
It's not just about the money, she said.
Some of her goals were to create greater
visibility for the Technion-Israel Institute
of Technology within the Detroit Jewish
community and make it more of a
household name.
"We all wanted to create a more
diverse group of lay leaders and wanted
to reach out to more women," she said.
"At the time, we had a group of entre-
preneurs who were primarily people
with engineering backgrounds. We've
created a fantastic Women's task force
made up of dynamic women — lay
leadership from all kinds of professional
and volunteer backgrounds."
Bloomfield Hills' Lawrence Jackier, a
national ATS board member, said she
"took what was a struggling, almost
moribund regional office out of Detroit
and turned it into probably the most
dynamic regional office in the whole
country.
"It's the professional that drives the
engine," he said. "She took an organiza-
tion and moved it way up the ladder of
success."
When the JCCouncil hired David Gad-
Harf in 1988, he said he had never
stayed in a job more than three or four
years. "Never did I think I would be
here 17 years," he said.
In 1988, the Council reflected the
1950s and 1960s, when "work was done
quietly behind closed doors and
involved developing ties to a few key
leaders in the non-Jewish community
without a whole lot of focus on our sup-
port or visibility within the Jewish com-
munity itself," he said, adding that his
job was "to make Council more of a rec-
ognized and valued force."
He said the Council has done that by
upgrading its role in news media rela-
tions to get the message out.
"Reaching 100 people at an event is
not enough. We need to reach thou-
sands of people to be really effective," he
said. "We've cultivated what I think are
really excellent and constructive working
relationships with all of the media, and
we've developed real expertise in house."
The Council also has expanded its
role in government relations, with a
focus on the state level, offering VIP
trips to Israel.
"We realize that so many of the
important decisions that affect the
Jewish community and so many of the
people who will eventually rise to
become members of Congress are at the
state level," he said.
He's proud of maintaining relation-
ships between the Jewish community
and the city of Detroit.
"Many important people in Detroit
had the impression that the Jews had
abandoned the city, didn't care about the
city — and one of the contributions of
the Detroit Jewish Initiative was to help