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Editorial
Commentary
Don't Diminish Role
Of Our Communal
Professionals
T
he professional heads of Detroit Jewry's
agencies ideally serve as invaluable cata-
lysts for driving our communal resources.
They guide, manage, nurture, challenge and ele-
vate — even inspire. As our emissaries, they help
shape our fluid communal agenda and direction.
Developing a pool of desirable candidates, from
within but also from elsewhere, must be a stand-
ing priority for each of our local agencies, which
together help make ours one of America's great
Jewish communities.
In May, Rick Loewenstein will leave as CEO of
Farmington Hills-based JARC after seven years
to pursue an entrepreneurial dream. JARC, a
$12-million organization with 300 employees,
nobly serves people with developmental disabili-
ties. From humble Jewish beginnings in 1969, it
has grown to serve 400 people and families via a
nonsectarian, community-based residential and
support network.
As Loewenstein passes the leadership reins to
JARC chief development officer Rena Friedberg,
who will serve as interim CEO, we're reminded
as a Jewish community to always replenish and
refresh — to always recruit, even if no vacancies
exist, and to always reinvigorate, thus helping cur-
rent leaders avoid complacency.
A Changing Dimension
In the same vein, we as a Jewish community must
embrace communicating and collaborating to
ensure our agencies commit to staying relevant
through programming innovation, staff develop-
ment and relationship building.
Like all communals, JARC knows government
is an unpredictable funding source. It knows
creative funding is important to not only serve
its base clientele, but also to look to serve people
who are deaf or autistic.
In recent years, JARC partnered with three
local Jewish nonprofits — Kadima, Friendship
Circle and Jewish Family Service — to run a suc-
cessful super raffle. The joint fundraiser benefited
a range of local residents with special needs. The
relationships built under the raffle rubric, and
since expanded, have worked to strengthen col-
lective advocacy for mental health and special
needs support.
JARC has gone beyond Jewish borders to team
with others that share an interest in serving
people with development disabilities, includ-
ing Angel's Place, a Christian agency, and the
Birmingham-Bloomfield Art Center. Other exam-
ples of such outreach include Jewish Federation
of Metropolitan Detroit initiatives in the city of
Detroit and our synagogue alliances with reli-
gious groups and humanitarian causes. The list is
impressive, but could always be longer.
46 April 16 • 2015
Even the best Jewish
professional leader
can't stay focused on
constituents when the
agency's organizational
timbers have begun
to wither.
Staying Vigilant
Funding for JARC and so many agencies like
it is at risk. For too many, funding is stagnant,
declining or gone. Cost oversight has become a
mandatory obsession as service demands mount.
The Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan
Detroit is seeking a new executive director while
under interim leadership amid a financial crisis
that underscores the necessity of scrupulous bud-
get controls. Then there's the matter of adequately
training, equipping, developing and paying front-
line staffers, each agency's lifeblood.
At the same time, each of our communals must
be cognizant of its operating structure. Even the
best Jewish professional leader can't stay focused
on constituents when the agency's organizational
timbers have begun to wither.
What's more, the traditional communal leader-
ship ladder isn't the only trajectory today for our
Jewish professionals. The ranks of industry and
beyond also are ripe for tapping. How do we as a
Jewish community seek to educate newly arriv-
ing pros from these ranks about the history and
nuances of who we are and what we stand for?
Jewish communal leadership often hinges
on the dynamic between the professionals and
the lay boards they serve. It's incumbent on our
boards to have a vision for what modern profes-
sional leadership means and how it fits into a
21st-century organizational structure. Other
board musts include having an adaptive mission
and set of objectives, a yen for adopting progres-
sive new technologies and systems, and a willing-
ness to retire waning business models.
Our boards certainly must embrace reinvention
and tweaking, as times dictate, to stay nimble and
responsive. That's the only way top communal
pros under their watch will continue to operate
with purpose and urgency. The best pros grasp
that "prime" on the bell curve of Jewish commu-
nal service means acting as responsible change
agents, not merely as guardians of process, how-
ever tired it may be. ❑
Could U.S. Threats Ward
Off Attacks By Iran?
he heart of the opposition to a network of formal commitments
the nuclear deal with Iran is guaranteeing that an attack by Iran
the fear, even the assump- on any of those countries would be
tion, that Iran will violate it, cheat- considered an attack on the United
ing on inspections and using the
States.
accord's provisions to double-deal
To some extent, American secu-
and weaponize.
rity guarantees to Israel and the
Opponents often cite North
Saudis are already implicit. But
Korea's violation of its deal with
new, firmer assurances, especially
the West in 2003.
if codified in a bilateral treaty
But they fail to
with Israel and a multilateral
mention that, how-
pact or series of arrange-
f
ever egregious an
ments with several Arab
Iranian "breakout"
states, would be permanent
would be, one dif-
and unmistakable, no matter
ference is clear:
who was in the White House.
North Korea did not
•
Such measures would
become a regional
sharply reduce the chance
force, even after it
of miscalculations by Iran.
ra
became a nuclear
Its leaders could not delude
power, because
Steven L. Spiegel themselves into thinking that
the United States
there would be no conse-
had major defense
quences if they threatened
treaties with South
or attacked one of their
Korea, Japan, Australia and the
neighbors – the kind of delusion
Philippines. An insurance system
under which North Korea invaded
was in place so that North Korea
South Korea in 1950, after the
could only move so far without
United States left unclear its inter-
precipitating a confrontation with
est in defending the Korean pen-
America.
insula.
If we don't trust the Iranians
In fact, in early 2008, both
– and why should we? – then we
Democratic presidential candi-
need similar arrangements with
dates, Barack Obama and Hillary
Israel and the concerned Arab
Rodham Clinton, went on the
states, Iran's adversaries in the
record about extending the U.S.
region who are close to the U.S.
"security umbrella" to Israel if Iran
Alongside the agreement with
obtained nuclear weapons. Clinton
Tehran, we can offer these states
added that she would "provide a
T
Commentary
Oversight
Of Congress
Is Required
The Iranians can't
be trusted to
comply with
President Obama's
agreement.
The following is a statement
by the Jewish Policy Center, a
conservative-oriented think tank
based in Washington, D.C.
e express grave res-
ervations over the
U.S.-Iran "parameters
for a joint comprehensive plan of
action" following the agreement
reached between Secretary of
State Kerry and Foreign Minister
Zarif in Lausanne.
The parameters published by
the White House do not consti-
tute an agreement, a treaty or
a binding document, making it
impossible to measure whether
or how the agreement constrains
Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weap-
ons capability. Such weapons