Sol Koenigsberg, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Kansas City from 1968 to 1989, has given us a memoir of his public career, a lively account of the movers and shakers in the Jewish community in the last half of the 20th century, and a guide through Jewish institutional and organizational life in Kansas City. It is an engaging memoir that will evoke nostalgia in the older generation, be a history lesson for the next generation, and serve as a primer and guidebook for future leaders and community members in Kansas City and elsewhere. In many ways it serves as a sequel to Joe Schultz’s edited 1982 “Mid-America’s Promise: A profile of Kansas City Jewry.” But if it also fills in the details and continues the story forward, it is a much richer, more nuanced story not only of Jewish institutions but also leaders and events. If Koenigsberg made Federation the central address of organized Jewish secular life during his tenure, he also played a major role in creating new institutions like the Jewish Community Foundation, the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy and the Jewish Community Campus.
“Challenge and Growth” is a memoir of Koenigsberg’s professional career as the leading Jewish civil servant in Kansas City; his personal life is mostly absent from the volume. So too are personal stories absent in the discussions and assessments of other professionals and volunteers with whom he worked during those years. He is generous in acknowledging the work of others, and while he is honest in his brief assessment of their contributions, we long for more behind the scenes stories if not gossip. Also absent are aspects of the Jewish community that did not involve Federation — religious life, synagogues, Jewish education other than Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, the Jewish Chronicle and other Jewish cultural activities, like the Jewish Museum Without Walls, founded by Sybil and Norman Kahn, or issues relating to kashrut and kosher butchers and groceries. He limits himself to what we might call the minhag (local custom) of Jewish Federation.
Koenigberg’s book gives brief biographies of his predecessors at Federation, This sets the stage for his arrival in Kansas City in 1968. A World War II sailor, he used the GI Bill to switch from music to social work. An internship at the University of Pennsylvania — assisting concentration camp survivors — then two years in Detroit helping Holocaust survivors, changed his life: he chose a career in Jewish communal service. When he came to Kansas City in 1968 he was a Zionist who believed in the centrality of Israel to Jewish identity, and found a community still influenced by a past anti-Zionist reputation.
Much of the book recounts for us momentous events and institutional changes in the Kansas City Jewish community during his years. While detailing Federation’s leadership in making Israel a priority in Kansas City, he also discusses the resettlement of Soviet Jews, assistance to North African Jews in Israel, and rescue of Beta Israel — Ethiopian Jews. At the same time he is occasionally critical of the inability of the Kansas City Jewish community to do more in these efforts.
But his memoirs are most important for what they tell us about the future of organized and institutional life in Kansas City. Kansas City played an innovative national role in creating an unaffiliated community day school and in bringing it within Federation; previously Jewish education had been left to synagogues or separate organizations. How that was achieved in Kansas City is still an untold story. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Federation during Koenigsberg’s tenure was the building of the Jewish Community Campus, that “unifying entity” that brought together all the major Jewish institutions except what became Village Shalom. Koenigsberg tells the story through his own reminiscences as well as interviews with other active leaders and participants. The visionaries proved right; not only were the funds raised and the debt retired, but both individual agencies and the Campus itself benefitted from their mutual relationship and helped reshape Jewish life. The Jewish community came to concentrate mostly in the area around the campus.
Equally important to understanding Kansas City Jewry and national philanthropy is the rise in importance of the Jewish Community Foundation, the Menorah Legacy Foundation, and the Jewish Heritage Foundation. While Federation retains a central role in long-time community planning, the annual campaign and giving — with its concern over 12-month budgets — is slowly giving way to endowment funds and donor-directed giving. Koenigsberg’s discussion of Jewish Community Foundation and interviews with Foundation leaders provides an essential road map for understanding the changes occurring in Jewish institutional life and philanthropy today.
This book takes seriously Jewish community institutions and organizations in a world in which such structures are undergoing significant, if not radical, change. If you want to understand how institutional Jewish life outside of synagogues got where they are today in Kansas City, this is the book to read. If you want to grapple with the changing organizational structure and what it might mean, this is the best starting point. And for anyone seeking to understand what is happening nationally in Jewish institutional life, this is a good primer.
David Katzman is professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, and was affiliated with the History and African and African-American Studies departments as well as the Jewish Studies Program. He contributed a chapter on the origins of Federation to “Mid-America’s Promise.” He is currently researching 19th-century Midwestern German-speaking Jewish communities and is zayde to five grandchildren.
