Jewish News weekly of Northern California, CA
Sept 9 2005

Local AJCommittee – 60 years of getting things done quietly

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

Think of them as the Navy Seals in wingtips.

For 60 years, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the American
Jewish Committee has been in, out and done with a situation before
anyone was the wiser. Operating largely under the media and
community’s radar, AJCommittee members rarely read about their
exploits in the next day’s papers – but, then again, that was never
the goal.

`We don’t make a fuss about things in the newspapers. It works better
this way. You don’t want to embarrass people unless they need to be
embarrassed,’ said Joe Durra, a local board president in the
mid-1980s.

`We put a lot of pressure on companies. If you’re like Bechtel and
Chevron and doing work in Saudi Arabia where no Jews are admitted at
all, [we] had to pretty much stay under the radar, right?’

Added Richard Johns, the AJCommittee’s immediate past president,
`Sometimes people don’t pay attention to us. They don’t pay attention
to us the first 30 or 40 times. We don’t yell or scream or
pontificate. We just try to be quiet and influential.’

Like most people, Johns can’t give a particularly succinct answer
when asked what, exactly, the AJCommittee does. It was founded 99
years ago in response to Russian pogroms, and, in short, has worked
to end discrimination against Jews and minorities in the United
States and around the world since – in its own way.

Rather than lead a demonstration in front of the Saudi consulate, for
example, the AJCommittee smuggled anti-Semitic, jihadist textbooks
out of the Wahabi nation, translated them and presented the tangible
evidence to the Saudi ambassador.

It was behind-the-scenes work at major international corporations
that helped to break the Arab boycott of Israel and the glass ceiling
for Jewish executives. Behind-the-scenes work got rabbis into
Catholic schools to explain Judaism to the students.

`More often than not, we’ve found that working with some degree of
discretion has been infinitely more productive than going in for the
immediate hit and the banner headline,’ said Ernest Weiner, the
AJCommittee’s regional director since 1972.

`Many people here treat diplomats almost as decorations. We don’t,’
he explained.

This way, the committe has cultivated a worldwide network of friends
and contacts. It’s only a matter of a few phone calls to set up
meetings with officials from China to Qatar. A network such as this
is a big help when you’re, say, hoping to do something about the
International Red Cross’ ongoing brushoff of Israel’s Magen David
Adom – as the local AJCommittee does..

But the issues confronting the committee often aren’t global at all.
One of Johns’ pet projects was dealing with anger that the
100-foot-tall cross atop San Francisco’s Mt. Davidson was on public
land.

While some groups advocated tearing down the metal cross, Johns and
the AJCommittee quietly organized an auction – `where anyone could
buy this baby’ – in which the land atop the hill was purchased by an
Armenian group for $20,000.

The Armenians made the cross into a memorial for the Armenian
genocide and also, at the AJCommittee’s behest, set up some displays
about the separation of church and state.

`So, church and state are separate up there,’ said Johns.