WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

You have lived in your federated community for years, You have served as Board Chair, or Campaign Chair or as a major donor but no longer. Yours is not a federation like Chicago or even Boston or Miami where, no matter the results of campaigns or allocations, you and your fellow "retirees" have neither influence or power. No, you are in a community where the men and women who are the "elders" (even as some are relatively young) ar respected for having built the community and the federation serves as the central Jewish address because of what you, collectively and historically, constructed over the decades. 

Now, quite suddenly, you and the others see that all that you have built is being destroyed by a small leadership cadre that neither understands nor appreciates federation, neither understands nor appreciates the sacred trust embodied in collective responsibility. The same thing that had taken 20 years to destroy the federation's value in Boston and San Francisco has happened in your hometown in but a single allocations cycle. Your community is unique -- the power rests with you, the Past Chairs, the major donors, not with the current so-called "leadership" that has brought your community to this day.

If you join as one, you can bring the community together; you can restore the pride, the values, the principles that once were but are today nothing more than lip service, a value system torn to shreds. There is unnanimity amog you, the builders, that what has happened over the past weeks will, immediately or over time, rend the very fabric of community. Build on that unity of feeling, and take back the community from those who neither understand the concept of Jewish community nor its meaning. But do it now; then lead us Continentally by dint of your example.

Please.

Rwexler