Melbourne needs a JCA

Joshua Levi

ONE thing has become apparent while putting together a Melbourne education feature – the lack of a unified communal leadership in Melbourne is a major stumbling block to reducing the cost of Jewish education.

After living in both Sydney and Melbourne I can say that Melbourne has a more heimish community – it’s nicer, friendlier and more intrinsically Jewish.

But the communal hierarchy in Victoria is non-existent and as a result the community is fragmented and
competitive.

Each organisation runs its own race and money is raised based on organisations’ ability to sell themselves, rather than the actual needs of the community.

With each group free to focus on its own interests, there is no strategic planning to address the major issues facing the community, including the cost of a Jewish education.

To resolve this, for the benefit of Victorian Jewry as a whole, it’s time to take a giant leap of faith and learn from NSW and launch a JCA.

The JCA in Sydney is tasked with ensuring Jewish continuity by raising money for the community, allocating it based on need, organising strategic planning and then dealing with both short-term problems and long-term obstacles.

Importantly, it raises more than $12 million each year which it distributes according to communal priorities. Furthermore, it is a place where highly capable and respected members of the community, who may not be aligned to one particular organisation, can share their expertise for the benefit of Sydney Jewry as a whole.

The cream of the crop sit on JCA committees, including Boston Consulting Group senior partner and managing director Anna Green, former National Australian Bank director Jillian Segal, Toga Group managing director Allan Vidor, former Hoyts CEO Peter Ivany, former Football Federation Australian board member Phil Wolanski, entrepreneur Jonathan Barouch and dozens of other business and communal leaders over the last decade.

What forum exists for their counterparts in Melbourne to play such a proactive and positive role in communal development? There is none.

By way of examples of just how critical a role a JCA can play, I can reveal for the first time that without the Sydney JCA, both the Emanuel School and Masada College would have likely closed in the last 15 years.

In the early 2000s, Emanuel’s loans were being called in by the bank and then-president Alex Abulafia asked JCA for emergency funding.

“The school was on the brink. If JCA didn’t come to the party I was going to close the school myself,” Abulafia said.

Eight years ago, Masada was in the same predicament, and from 2010-13 JCA gave the school an extra $300,000 a year to stay afloat.

Although Sydney’s north shore has a shrinking Jewish community, JCA’s leaders concluded that in the future house prices in the eastern suburbs would be unaffordable and the community would start to return to the north. For that community to be viable, they needed the school to survive.

Both Emanuel and Masada used the short-term finance they received to consolidate and rejuvenate, and as a result they are now both financially stable.

Melbourne JCA: Plans are underway

School fees: Why is Melbourne more expensive?

Crucially though, the JCA does not simply step in for emergencies. It allocates millions of dollars to Sydney’s Jewish schools every year, which means that parents don’t need to foot the full bill to finance subsidies.

That JCA gave $3.2 million in Sydney last year to keep fees down. The same could happen in Melbourne.

It is also worth noting that Sydney’s Jewish schools are significantly better funded by the state, in no small part due to effective lobbying by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. As it currently stands, the Jewish Community Council of Victoria lacks the Board’s status and clout, but with proper funding from a JCA that could change.

In short, to address community-wide issues, such as the cost of Jewish school fees, there must be one organisation comprising the best and brightest to determine communal priorities and to fund them accordingly.

Who knows what ideas they may come up with? The first step, though, is to get them together.

Joshua Levi is the CEO of The Australian Jewish News.