RELIGION / JOHN DART : Regional Jewish Group Gains Clout : Demographics: The Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles agrees to more representation for newly named San Fernando Valley Alliance.

Jewish leaders in the San Fernando Valley have won more clout within the community service behemoth known as the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, as well as achieving a degree of autonomy.

The federation, which has 450 affiliated community and religious organizations, a 206-member board and nearly 1,750 employees, raised $42 million last year. About half of the money goes to Israel and the rest to the federation’s 15 agencies, internal operations and related entities.

The sizable Jewish population of the San Fernando Valley and environs has been pressing for greater local control within the federation, a movement similar to demands for more Valley autonomy in Los Angeles political and public school agencies. Jewish community leaders addressed those demands in six months of negotiations at the federation’s headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard.

“The discussions were heated at times, but Valley people felt they had not been given their due and promises that had been made before had not been implemented,” said federation President Terry Bell, herself a Van Nuys native.

Under an agreement announced this week, the newly named San Fernando Valley Alliance of the federation will have six appointees (instead of one) on the federation’s 40-member executive committee. Representation on the 33-member planning and allocation committee will also rise from one member to six.

And, for the first time, the Valley-based federation officers will have control of their own spending within an allocated budget and will do their own hiring and firing, said Earl Greinetz, president of the alliance.

“The bottom line of the whole move was that we felt the Valley could raise more money if people here felt we had more responsibility and independence,” said Greinetz, owner of a property management company and who lives and works in Encino.

The upgrading of the Valley region to a partially independent body arrives a little before the federation’s annual Super Sunday appeal for the United Jewish Fund on March 13.

Some 2,000 telephone volunteers will be calling potential donors that day from the temporary Woodland Hills headquarters of the Alliance, which was displaced by the Jan. 17 earthquake from its permanent location on the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus in West Hills.

Last year, the Valley region--which includes the San Fernando, Antelope, Santa Clarita, Simi and Conejo valleys--raised $6.3 million of the federation’s $42 million total.

That did not necessarily represent the true proportion of Valley giving, Greinetz said. He pointed out that Valley donors could pledge gifts through their workplace, trade association or other organizations that might be located in another part of Los Angeles.

“We feel we raise a lot more money than shows up in the ‘Valley’ amount,” Greinetz said.

At the same time, many Jewish leaders admit that they can only guess what proportion of the estimated 600,000 Los Angeles area Jews live north of Mulholland Drive. Federation officials sometimes say half, sometimes less than half.

Greinetz estimated that the Valley may have 40% of the Jewish population served by the federation.

“We know we need to do a demographic study,” Bell said, “but it would be so expensive that we feel it is more important to help people instead.”

She also emphasized in an interview that, despite some decentralization, there are some region-wide federation programs and functions that override geographical divisions.

“Helping the homeless and maintaining the kosher kitchen on Fairfax Avenue, for example, is as important to Valley people as it is to the rest of the Jewish community,” Bell said.

Nevertheless, Greinetz said the Valley has special, lingering problems resulting from layoffs in the aerospace industry and new ones deriving from heavy earthquake damage to residences in communities such as Sherman Oaks with large Jewish populations.

Among Jewish agencies with Valley offices are those assisting in job training, crisis counseling, education, loans to the needy, legal assistance and companionship for children from broken homes.

Some Jewish religious leaders have complained in past decades that the Jewish Federation Council had a strongly secular cast and did not work readily with synagogues. That trend has reversed itself in recent years, most observers say, but in the Valley relations between the synagogues and federation agencies appear to be well-established.

“All the people I work with in the federation are synagogue-oriented people,” said Greinetz, who is a vice president at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and was once president of a synagogue that has since merged with another.

Indeed, in the Los Angeles Times Poll of San Fernando Valley adults in December, 1991, 10% of those surveyed said they were Jewish, and of those, 44% belonged to a congregation. Most surveys of Los Angeles Jews have indicated that synagogue affiliation ranges around 25%.

The synagogues and rabbis who do work with the federation are primarily in the large Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism. The federation historically has had difficulty involving Orthodox religious bodies, whose interpretation of Jewish law and practices tends to set them apart from non-religious and non-Orthodox Jews.

“We are doing outreach to the Orthodox synagogues in the Valley, and we very much want them to be a part of us,” Greinetz said.

As the San Fernando Valley Alliance of the Jewish Federation Council looks ahead, however, Bell and Greinetz conceded in separate interviews that there may be a day when the Jewish communities in Conejo, Santa Clarita and other valleys may find it irritating to be lumped in with the San Fernando Valley.

“There is no question that people in the Conejo Valley are going to say we want representation,” Bell said. “They are voices we will have to listen to.”