World Jewish Congress fires chairman Israel Singer in surprise move

World Jewish Congress fires chairman Israel Singer in surprise move
Mar 13 2007
By Amiram Barkat,
Haaretz Correspondent

Israel Singer and Edgar Bronfman. Which would you trust?


Israel Singer, one of the heads of the World Jewish Congress and a leading figure in the Jewish world for the past 30 years, was dismissed in an unexpected move Wednesday from all his posts in the WJC, Haaretz has learned. The decision to fire Singer was announced by WJC President Edgar Bronfman and approved by the WJC steering committee. It was, however, received with great surprise by Congress officials around the world. The development marks an all-time low in the history of the organization, which represents Jewish communities in more than 80 countries around the world.

Singer was one of the participants in the conference call but was not given the opportunity to speak, and declined Thursday to respond to the dismissal. The heads of the Jewish Congress in Europe and Israel on Thursday informed Bronfman that they were shocked by the decision, and threatened to pull their organizations from the WJC if he did not revoke Singer's dismissal and a series of other decisions they were informed of on Wednesday.

• Singer and Bronfman became the most well-known pair in the Jewish world in the 1980s, when they led a public campaign to expose the Nazi past of former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.
  
• In the 1990s, the duo facilitated the long-standing negotiations with Swiss banks over compensation payments for Jewish proprietors of dormant bank accounts.
  
• Over the years, Singer and Bronfman held hundreds of meetings with prime ministers, politicians and senior religious leaders around the world over the restitution of Jewish property, the struggle with anti-Semitism and Israel.

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World Jewish Congress

• Finances, Irregularities, and Corruption
• Controversy and Internal Conflicts
• Racist Remarks by WJC Officials

Rabbi Israel Singer, in the position as the president of the Claims Conference,

"an umbrella organization that has paid millions of dollars to the March of the Living, a Holocaust education group that brings students to Poland and Israel ... began payments to Hoxter totaling $709,000 in 2003. That was the same year Singer 'was instructed to stop funneling unauthorized payments to him via the World Jewish Congress ‹ payments that had by then totaled $657,600,'"^[8]

Singer denied the accusations and Hoxter states that he can not state the specifics of his position. In an Article of the Jewish Week Israel Singer is cited with the following statement: "

I'm not involved in allocating Claims Conference funds and certainly have no say or interest in any consultants that grant recipients might choose to hire. ..."^[8] "I have no idea. I have no recollection. It was just something I assisted on. I prefer not to go into any details. It was not a major activity. I’d have to check my records.”^[9]

Several internal disputes of the World Jewish Congress followed within the last decade. The firing of Rabbi Israel Singer has been associated with the internal power struggles on Bronfman's behalf - according the a March 25, 2007 article published by Haaretz

"Singer told Bronfman that he wasn't prepared to fight Jews".^[4]

A leaked document indicates, that Steven Herbits, the WJC’s secretary general, worked behind the screens to

"pave the way for Matthew Bronfman’s ascension. Now members of the steering committee say that the younger Bronfman is not being considering as a potential candidate."^[7]

Another reason for Singers dismissal was that

"he did not devote himself sufficiently to the election of Bronfman's son Matthew as the next president of the WJC."^[4]

The dismissal of Singer became the issue of heated discussions within the Jewish community; several letters to the editors of the Jewish Press discuss the dismissal and the "old boy network":

"The Israel Singer debacle made me think about the process by which people become leaders in the Jewish community. Edgar Bronfman’s big bucks enable him to take over the World Jewish Congress, and Israel Singer becomes a leader in that organization because his then-friend Edgar Bronfman makes him one."^[10]