Yearning for the Days of Abraham Bayer
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, February 23, 1996
In my hands is a document so mind-numbing in its irrelevance that only the apparatchiks of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council could have produced it. It makes me yearn for the days of Abraham Bayer, but more about that in a minute.
The 51-page document contains the “Joint Program Plan Drafts for the 1996 Plenum,” and is written in a language related to English. I have forced my way through this document in order to understand what NJCRAC does. This is an important question because NJCRAC, under the guidance of its executive vice chairman, Lawrence Rubin, is trying to expand beyond its original mandate — which no Jew I’ve spoken to understands exactly — and become an independent presence on the Jewish political scene, as a counterpart to the mainstream defense agencies, the ADL and the AJCs.
These agencies aren’t excited by the prospect of NJCRAC muscling — if that’s the word — into their territory, and few disinterested observers of Jewish organizational life believe that what Jews need is another Washington policy-making group (there is already one AJC too many). But NJCRAC is looking for a piece of the action, which I know because the “Joint Program Plan” contains several references to “action.” Here, for instance, is one of NJCRAC’s “action recommendations”: “The Jewish community relations field should interpret to the United States Administration and the Congress, particularly to candidates for office and newly elected members, and other decision-makers, the importance of the United States-Israel relationship.”
Controversial stuff, this, and a function that no Jewish organization except for AIPAC and about 450,000 other groups perform — so well, in fact, that many members of Congress who have been subjected to “interpretation” sessions can now out-Jabotinsky Morton Klein.
Here’s another NJCRAC “action recommendation”: “The Jewish community relations field should engage in an in-depth study process aimed at exploring the First Amendment implications of cyberspace and internet applications, and the ramifications of this issue for the Jewish community.”
These are people with a lot of free time on their hands (and still they’ve been scooped by the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center).
The Joint Program Plan also contains NJCRAC’s position on crime (against) and poverty (ditto). Also, NJCRAC opposes anti-Semitism.
It is astonishing that the Jewish community would want to expand, and not shrink, NJCRAC’s role, given that the group’s philosopher-statesmen hew to the same vanilla agenda already espoused by a dozen Jewish organizations.
Was NJCRAC always so irrelevant? It’s hard to remember, but there was a day when NJCRAC stood at the center of the Jewish story. Then Abraham Bayer died.
Abraham Bayer was for many years NJCRAC’s director of international concerns, and one of the great Jewish freedom fighters of the last 50 years. He was NJCRAC’s most priceless asset, though in the year before he died of prostate cancer he was horribly mistreated by the organization for which he did so much. The abuse Abraham Bayer took from NJCRAC says more about the organization than any cliche-filled document.
When Bayer died in the fall of 1994, it was written of him, “Never shall they see his face, never shall they know his name,” and though he did his work without benefit of press releases, his deeds were known in certain circles. Among the Nazi-hunters, for instance: The director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations; Eli Rosenbaum, wrote, “A true accounting of OSI’s work would give Bayer shared credit for every successful Nazi prosecution recorded by the Department of Justice.”
He is remembered by Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel, who has called him a key force in the building of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He is remembered, too, by the refuseniks — Natan Sharansky, for one, who has said he owes his freedom to Abraham Bayer. And among Ethiopian Jewry, he is remembered as a liberator, one of the first Jewish leaders to embrace the Ethiopians as Jews, and one of the first to make the dangerous trip into Gondar to lay the groundwork for Operation Moses.
But NJCRAC didn’t seem to appreciate what Bayer did on its behalf, a fact I found surprising until I was put straight by Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “Abe did a lot of the things he did for persecuted Jews despite NJCRAC, not because of it,” he told me.
Which partially explains why NJCRAC would treat Bayer so callously in his last year of life. It was Mr. Rubin who, according to four sources with knowledge of these events, told Bayer not to come into the office because his co-workers found his cancer depressing; tried to cut Bayer down to three days of work a week, and admonished Bayer — a man who walked through Ethiopia for NJCRAC — for arriving late for work, even though Bayer explained that his cancer forced him to take a bus because subway stairs were too difficult to negotiate.
“They said horrible things to him,” Mr. Hoenlein says, (Mr. Rubin did not return telephone calls seeking comment).
Even after Bayer’s death, NJCRAC’s dreadful behavior continued; the group released Bayer’s pension money to his widow nearly a year after his death, and only after she hired a lawyer to force them to turn over what belonged to her.
Mr. Hoenlein and other prominent Jewish leaders attempted to help Bayer, to no avail. “I tried to intervene,” Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told me, though he refused to go into detail.
Part of the hostility to NJCRAC can be attributed to the group’s clumsy reach for relevance in a Jewish community that has passed it by, but I sense that many Jewish leaders are still disturbed by the distinctly un-Jewish way NJCRAC treated Abe Bayer.
“Abe deserved to be treated the way he treated Jews in need, with the same kind of empathy that he gave to Jews in need,” says Mr. Foxman, “and that didn’t happen.”