Another Jewish agency has announced the closure of a San Francisco branch office, raising again the question whether shutting a local operation may ultimately cost more in support than it saves in operating expenses.
B’nai B’rith International gave its Golden Pacific region board of directors the bad news at its annual meeting June 6 at the Four Winds Sheraton Hotel in Sunnyvale.
The closure plan, which the Bulletin learned of last week, calls for the shutdown of nine of its 18 U.S. regional offices, including those in San Francisco, Seattle and Las Vegas. The Los Angeles office will remain as the organization’s only West Coast office.
Local officials, including Warner Oberndoerfer, president of the Golden Pacific region, said they’ve been officially informed that the office’s two paid staffers will work their last day on June 30.
“The office will close at the end of this month,” he said. “It will become an all-volunteer organization. We’ll continue the region, but it will be run essentially through my house and my phone.”
However, contradicting information received locally, Harvey Berk, B’nai B’rith’s Washington, D.C.-based communications director, balked last week when asked about the pull-out here. “It’s too soon to say we are closing the San Francisco office,” he said. “That may not happen at all — local areas may come up with the funds to stay open.”
Still, he confirmed, “we’re definitely going to be closing some offices.”
A fraternal philanthropic and service organization, B’nai B’rith was founded in 1843 and has offices in 57 countries.
As to its financial health, neither local or national officials would divulge specific figures. However, no one disputes that B’nai B’rith is having money troubles. The national organization is allegedly in debt to the tune of $3.5 million, according to Milton Jacobs, Golden Pacific region vice president .
And, while some details of the restructuring program have yet to be resolved, officials told Oberndoerfer that other steps are being taken in addition to the closings.
In response to the closing, Jacobs said the national board rushed into restructuring without adequate planning. “They did this without a great deal of research,” said Jacobs, who is a past member of the organization’s international board of governors and a former international vice president.
The closures come just two years after B’nai B’rith’s national board opted to divide its seven districts into 18 regions, each with an office. Each regional office sent its revenues to the headquarters in Washington and received an allowance.
“They thought they could keep all the money and power in Washington, and that we would fall into lockstep,” he said.
Now that the expansion has apparently failed, Jacobs said he is “very concerned” that the organization could cease to have any presence in Northern California.
The biggest regret, say local officials, is the loss of its executive director, Carol Harris, and her assistant, Jackie Crivinar, the office’s only paid staffers.
“This organization’s heads think they can manage from 3,000 miles away,” said Jack Mihalovich, local past president
“B’nai B’rith is very much alive, and it’s still doing wonderful things internationally,” he added. But “San Francisco is not a two-bit community. When we lose an office we lose a right arm.”
Mihalovich attended the June 6 meeting, which he said was well-attended by members throughout the Golden Pacific region. Local officials, he said, had long suspected the closure announcement, which was given at the meeting by Dan Frank, B’nai B’rith International’s senior vice president.
As to Berk’s statement that the local closure hasn’t been confirmed, Mihalovich said, “There was absolutely no waffling” about the impending cutback at the meeting.
Harris said that despite the cutbacks, she expects the organization to thrive — albeit at a slower pace.
“B’nai B’rith has been around for 150 years, and it will be around for at least another 150,” she said. “It’s a wonderful organization and I support them in doing what they need to do as an organization.”
However, she said that “some of the programs we created will be put on hold” for lack of professional expertise, such as the “Mitzvah-a-Month” project. Through that program, young people would connect to Jewish values by visiting Jewish seniors, replanting in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and soliciting book donations for literacy efforts in low-income areas.
The cutbacks are reminiscent of a strategy advanced — then abandoned in recent weeks– by two other big-scale Jewish agencies: American Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National Fund. Both considered closing Northern California offices and transferring their responsibilities to Los Angeles staff. Both organizations reversed course after protests from San Francisco community leaders and donors.
“The path of common sense when you have limited resources is to put them in the areas where you get a greater rate of return,” said Oberndoerfer. “Their sense was that the L.A. office is a better investment. The downside is that we will not have a professional staff. A lot of work of staff has been in the area of development, so we may well suffer in the fund-raising area.”
Jacobs has developed a revenue-sharing plan that would allow branch offices to stay afloat by keeping some of the money they raise before sending the bulk on to Washington. He plans to submit the idea to the national leadership.
Oberndoerfer said two factors are fueling the frantic restructuring efforts of B’nai B’rith and other agencies: a radical demographic shift in the traditional donor communities and an East-vs.-West tussle that West Coast critics say has bumped Californians from the national stage.