ISRAEL : Chairman Choice Signals New Direction for Jewish Agency : Avraham Burg hopes to strengthen education in Diaspora communities.

Avraham Burg, an observant Jew and a political dove, this week vaulted into the nation’s power elite by ascending to the Jewish Agency’s chairmanship.

The agency’s 120-member board of governors on Wednesday elected Burg head of the oldest and most important institutional link between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. His selection was seen as a victory for a small group of Labor Party activists who hope to pull the party further to the left after its septuagenarian leaders, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, finally leave the scene.

Burg has said he believes that the agency should invest more in strengthening Jewish education in Diaspora communities and bolster ties between Diaspora Jews and Israel in an era when Israel is no longer an embattled nation surrounded by enemies.

“Can we, and how do we, survive without an external enemy? That is the question of our times,” Burg said after his election Wednesday.

His selection was also seen as a victory for the American Jewish community, which is heavily represented in the quasi-governmental agency.

Burg, who often points out that he is among a minority of Labor Party members who wear a yarmulke, the skullcap worn by religious Jews, “is charismatic in a way that speaks to the sensibilities and passions of the American Jew. Not all Israeli political personalities are able to do that,” said Roberta Fahn, an American-born Israeli political consultant with close ties to American Jewry.

With his moderate political views and an avowed commitment to religious pluralism, Burg “touches American Jews on both an intellectual and a soulful level,” Fahn said.

A Labor Party parliamentarian, the 40-year-old Burg is a former paratrooper who was a leader of the protest movement against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He is an aggressive promoter of peacemaking with the Arabs and an ardent supporter of Israel’s peace accord with the Palestine Liberation

Organization.

Together with his political allies, who include Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin and Haim Ramon, head of the giant Histadrut labor federation, Burg promises to rebuild Labor’s institutions and help it shed its sclerotic public image.

Observers say he has found the right address if he wants to earn a reputation as a reformer.

The Jewish Agency is experiencing both a decline in donations and an identity crisis. Last year, Beilin caused a sensation by publicly recommending that the Jewish Agency be dismantled and replaced with a more democratic institution that would stop raising private funds for Israel and instead buy plane tickets for young Jews to visit the Jewish state.

Beilin’s attack on the agency earned him a sharp and public rebuke from Rabin, who said that he did “not speak for the government.” But it also triggered a process of soul-searching within the agency and among other traditional Zionist organizations.

Asked what he intends to do until June, when his acting chairmanship is to be confirmed by the general assemblies of the agency and the World Zionist Organization, Burg replied: “Learn, learn, learn.”

The agency’s primary task remains what it was when it was formed during the pre-state years: bringing Jews to Israel and helping them settle here. Its mission beyond that is unclear. Many Israelis have regarded it as little more than a comfortable dumping ground for Israeli politicians whose careers have peaked.

The Jewish Agency’s core problem is that it “is a historic organization that has fulfilled its goal, which was the establishment of a Jewish state,” said Peter Meading, a professor of political science at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “Burg has got to try and find a way of revamping it, of giving it some elan and some sense of mission and achievement.”

Unlike past chairmen of the Jewish Agency, Burg is a politician looking for a stepping stone to higher office rather than a rest stop before retirement, Meading said. “No one believes this is Avraham Burg’s last job.”