General Background

The program is intended to develop leadership among middle management of the Jewish Agency from an organization-wide perspective. The guiding conception of the program aspires to present a picture for the fellows of the environment in which they operate, to clarify basic concepts systematically and to isolate the dilemmas and decisions confronting the Jewish Agency.

The program explores the assumptions, basic concepts and perceptions shaping the work of the Agency, with an attempt to examine their suitability to the environment. There is parallel analysis of the complexity and dynamism of settings in which the Jewish Agency and related players operate. The backdrop for all this is the loss of near-exclusivity that marked the organization’s working environment in its early decades.

In designing the program, planners constantly went back and forth between conceptual issues in the context of policy for the Jewish people, structural issues pertaining to the organization’s patterns of operation and challenges posed from the outside. For example, an attempt is made to grapple with the question of how an organization founded under conditions of a “state-in-the-making” that fulfilled collective functions in the age of “nation-building” can operate in a new era of the Jewish world and State of Israel. This day and age is characterized by more complex questions of identity, more diverse living conditions among Jews, blurred boundaries of Jewish community and a redefinition of relations among individual, community and society. These changes, which are sometimes defined in terms of globalization, post-modernism and post-industrialism, pose great risks for an organization such as the Jewish Agency but embody opportunities as well. In the program, we try to survey how the Jewish Agency identifies, defines and contends with these changes.
 
The program includes peer learning, based on dilemmas that arise in the fellows’ work as well as presentation of the Jewish Agency’s work as seen by partners active in relevant environments. Part of the program is devoted to writing policy papers that will be presented to Jewish Agency management.