Finger-Pointing Over Jewish Centers Won’t Save Them

Perhaps the oldest cliche in law enforcement is the one about family disputes being the most

acrimonious, especially when money or property is involved. That may help explain the rancor surrounding the financial

disaster roiling one of Los

Angeles’ oldest community-service institutions.

The institution is the Jewish Community Centers Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, the umbrella agency for what was once a network of seven neighborhood JCCs founded as long ago as the 1930s and reaching from Silver Lake to the West Valley.

Since the group abruptly discovered a hole of roughly $2 million in its budget in 2001, it has placed most of this historic legacy up for sale, like a mismanaged corporation closing rural factories. Santa Monica’s Bay Cities JCC has already been shuttered and sold. The North Valley JCC in Granada Hills, scene of a horrific 1999 anti-Semitic shooting attack, has been bought by a developer who is temporarily allowing a newly independent community group to continue operating programs on its premises. The JCCs in Sherman Oaks and Silver Lake are on the block while their local members frenetically try to raise funds to outbid land developers for the buildings and rescue their preschool and after-school programs from extinction.

The situation has given rise to a three-way round of finger-pointing about who’s responsible and who should take the lead in fixing the mess. The local communities blame the umbrella organization, known as JCCGLA, for mishandling their communal budget. GLA officials say the locals are in denial about the need to bring in enough revenue to keep their centers open.

But both sides reserve most of their anger for a third party: the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, which raises $60 million to $70 million a year for local Jewish institutions, and happens to be the GLA’s creditor for that $2-million deficit.

“There’s no question the federation could solve this,” says L.A. City Councilman Eric Garcetti, who attended the Silver Lake JCC as a child and is trying to help a neighborhood group buy the center from GLA. “They’re the ones with the resources.” But he says federation President John Fishel has rebuffed his request for a meeting with GLA officials and Silver Lake JCC members. Garcetti and Fishel have scheduled a private tete-a-tete for this afternoon.

Fishel told me he’s avoiding a three-way sit-down because he believes the federation should stick to subsidizing actual programs, rather than buying buildings. “There is a perception that we have unlimited funds,” he says. “That’s not the case and never been the case.”

Still, the Jewish Federation is hardly a disinterested party. The interlinked relationship among the federation, GLA and the neighborhood centers dates back decades, although the history is murky in spots.

Start with how GLA got to own the individual JCCs in the first place. They were built by their local communities -- most of the buildings seem to date to the 1950s -- and subsequently deeded to the central organization, evidently to allow them to consolidate their income and expenses.

For many years, that arrangement was a source of strength. According to GLA’s current board president, Randy Myer, each year some JCCs showed a deficit and some a surplus, but all their results were netted out, leaving a nominal overall deficit. This was covered every year by the federation to the tune of about $4 million annually through the 1990s.

By the end of the decade, however, the federation started pulling back. Confronting mounting demands from competing programs, it reduced its stipend to the JCCs and cut its annual funding for building improvements.

Fishel blames the decline in JCC membership over the last 10 years or so on the centers’ inability to keep up with competing local institutions -- health clubs, synagogues with child and senior programs, and so on. But Myer says a major factor was the reduced federation support, which led to dilapidated buildings and reduced services.

The real crisis erupted in October 2001. That’s when Fishel informed GLA officials that they were behind on their payroll account by more than $1.6 million. In the past, the federation had covered this deficit with a rolling advance. The call revealed that for years GLA had been living in a fiscal dream world.

Despite its shrinking revenue, GLA had never recognized the urgent need to cut expenditures. Myer says that’s because its then-chief financial officer concealed mounting red ink by quietly borrowing money from several backup capital funds. “One day we woke up and found the backup money wasn’t there,” she says. (The officer was fired in late 2001 and has since died.)

What happened next is in dispute. Myer says Fishel insisted on an almost immediate repayment of the advance, ordering the GLA to close all its nursery-school programs by the end of the year and to start selling JCCs to cover the debt. “The federation honestly believed that no one would care” about the centers, she says.

Fishel responds: “That’s just false. We didn’t want to see them precipitously close early childhood services for families. But we wanted them to develop a plan to show us how they could survive long-term.” In any case, he acknowledges, “at that point, things got fairly acrimonious.”

In the end, the federation accepted $1.1 million in liens on two JCCs -- Bay Cities and Silver Lake -- as security for its payroll and agreed, for the nonce, not to press for repayment.

But since then, the fiscal crisis hasn’t materially eased and the concern for the survival of local Jewish community centers has grown. The GLA talks about consolidating its programs at the thriving West Hills and Westside JCCs, as though this is merely a reduction in scale rather than the permanent end to programs that can’t simply be shifted from one center to another across town. (For a family with a preschooler enrolled in Silver Lake, say, a program at the Westside JCC at Olympic and Fairfax is hardly an option.)

“I try to convince myself that Valley Cities JCC isn’t the building but the people,” says Michael Brezner, president of the Sherman Oaks institution, which serves 1,000 folks in an average week. “But that’s easier said than done.”

Leaders of the threatened centers say the looming death sentences have hampered their own fundraising efforts and driven members away. North Valley JCC, which in 1999 had about 100 children enrolled in preschool and kindergarten, is down to 19 now, according to its president, Elaine Fox. The slide is self-perpetuating, she observes: “When you have fewer programs, you have declining membership.”

Others say the crisis is not only about safeguarding locations for ongoing programs, but about preserving the very fabric of the Jewish community in this sprawling metropolis. That’s especially so given that the closings would come just as some of the affected neighborhoods are showing signs of a communal rebirth. “We should be arguing over how much to expand Valley Cities JCC, not whether to close it,” the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles said in an editorial last week.

An insistence that each individual JCC pay its own way, as though it’s a branch of a retail chain required to meet a sales quota, can only get in the way of the entire network’s survival. But the alternative requires that local philanthropists -- and the big community agencies they support -- recognize that community-building starts with the grass roots, and that in the long run it doesn’t pay to treat important neighborhood institutions so shabbily.

*

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You

can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.