Goot bye and goot luck
WHEN I assumed the presidency of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) with an experienced and committed team three short years ago, I did so on the basis of a strategic plan for the ECAJ that I had prepared with my NSW colleagues.
The plan recognised that while the ECAJ is the national roof body of the Jewish community, drawing its members from and being accountable to the whole Australian Jewish community, and was performing very valuable work, it was not properly equipped to fulfil its potential and to meet the increasing challenges the community faced in a wide range of areas.
Central to the plan was the recognition that heightened challenges require a heightened and greater professional public affairs advocacy effort. The times demanded a strong representative voice, which did not seek to quell other voices but which sought to coordinate and leverage them. These were the challenges that I believed the ECAJ must be equipped to meet.
As I noted in 2007, if the ECAJ was to fulfill its role, it must be seen and accepted as: the official representative spokesbody of Australian Jewry; the authoritative source of policy; the first point of contact for comment; and a professional coordinator of representational views on all lay matters and questions that concern Australian Jewry. This, in turn, would require the ECAJ to be properly resourced with personnel, finances, research capabilities and knowledge resources.
In that sense, it was well past time to re-position the ECAJ as the pre-eminent national representative organ of the Jewish community and coordinator of community representation. We had put it on a professional footing to enable the community’s voice to be listened to with respect, knowing that the ECAJ is representative, measured and reasonable in its advocacy as well as focused on leveraging and coordinating views.
That was our challenge and I am pleased to say that in the intervening three years, we have seen the transformation of the ECAJ. Specifically: we appointed Peter Wertheim as the ECAJ’s executive director, who has had experience in communal leadership at a high level, understands the community and the issues, and has recognised skills and experience as an advocate of those issues; we anchored the administration of the ECAJ in Sydney, so that regardless of the state in which the president lives in the future, the administrative headquarters will not change as was the case for the first 60-plus years of the organisation; we secured proper office facilities and established a funding base beyond the subscriptions of our affiliates (the roof bodies of each state and the ACT) and our constituents (the federal Jewish communal organisations); and we have had our voice heard internationally.
This paradigm shift has enabled, and will in the future enable, the ECAJ to perform its vitally important work in a more professional, efficient and, above all, effective manner in a wide range of areas, including political advocacy, communal security, interfaith and other communal engagement, legal and other action against anti-Semitism, promotion of human rights generally, educational issues and representing the Australian Jewish community at world Jewish forums.
While a great many activities have been undertaken by the ECAJ in the current three-year term of office, I would highlight in particular the ECAJ’s: intervention to have a Jewish 2020 Summit; representations to the federal government to not attend the Durban 11 conference in Geneva in 2009; setting up of the Jewish Communal Security Fund; the convening of the Conference to Combat Anti-Semitism; establishment of the Trade Union Task Force to work with Australian unions and the Australian Council of Trade Unions on a range of domestic and foreign policy issues; shutting down several anti-Semitic websites via complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission; successful intervention with the federal and state governments to preserve shechitah; progress in having the Shoah included as a mandatory element in the national year 10 history curriculum; successful prosecution of Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben for contempt of the Federal Court of Australia; work in reversing the call by the National Council of Churches of Australia to consider a boycott of Israel; steering the development of the World Jewish Congress’s (WJC) international action plan against the assault on Israel’s legitimacy; and our promotion of greater understanding of the vital work of the Claims Conference.
BUT while what has been achieved is an important start, much remains to be done to consolidate the ECAJ’s organisational improvements and funding base and to buttress the community in the troubled times ahead.
Those challenges will see the ECAJ establish a more regular presence in the national capital to serve parliamentarians, the bureaucracy, the diplomatic community and the press gallery. The ECAJ will also be implementing a comprehensive plan to proactively advocate for Israel’s legitimacy as the nation state of the Jewish people, and to repel the assault on Israel’s legitimacy, especially through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. In addition, the ECAJ will, of course, vigorously pursue the fight against anti-Semitism in all its manifestations and the myriad domestic issues with which the ECAJ is charged, including Jewish education, counter-acting assimilation, and defending and enlarging human rights.
The necessary significant strengthening and reaffirmation of the role of the ECAJ which must continue, should not be seen as a move to exclude other organisations from their legitimate roles in the community, but rather as a necessary refocusing of effort in a cooperative endeavour to maximise the effectiveness of representation on behalf of Australian Jewry.
I am confident the incoming committee of management of the ECAJ led by Dr Danny Lamm will be equal to the task ahead and I look forward to working with them as immediate past president as well as to my ongoing role as a vice-president of the WJC and as a director of the Claims Conference.
The ECAJ presidency has been an exhilarating and challenging experience and I thank the community for affording me the opportunity to be its leader.