There’s a good chance many synagogues aren’t in compliance with state and federal workplace laws, Barry Mael, senior director of synagogue affiliations, operations and program support at the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), told eJewishPhilanthropy. “Not purposefully, but just because they don’t know certain laws.”

When synagogues can’t afford human resource staff, everything falls onto the executive director’s shoulders, and they drown in paperwork, struggling with hiring, onboarding, professional development and compliance. 

“Synagogues just don’t have the resources,” Mael said. “They might have volunteers [helping with HR], but they don’t have access to a lot of the services.”

Last year, the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) soft-launched Jewish Human Resources — or JHR — in a dozen Reform congregations, and now the organization is offering it to the rest of the movement’s nearly 850 American congregations as well as Jewish organizations outside of the URJ umbrella. The first to sign up was the USCJ.

For years, USCJ received calls from congregations seeking help. They wanted to offer better health care,  guidance with compliance and help with onboarding. “The answer was usually, ‘No,’” Mael said. “We have an HR director who could do consultations, but it was different than having somebody who’s working with and for you, who can provide answers and help with employee handbooks or harassment trainings and all these things that are part of compliance.”

The cost of JHR varies based on a congregation’s or organization’s size, number of employees and services they need. While some organizations will be able to replace a position, in most cases, staff will simply redirect their energy to other matters, such as volunteer development or fundraising. The program might not save organizations money — at first — but it will improve employee well-being and allow organizations to run more efficiently, Mael said. Organizations will also be able to offer lower rates for better health care because the companies managing JHR buy directly from health-care providers at a time when these costs are skyrocketing. 

“It really stems from Deuteronomy 6:18, which says, ‘Do what is right and good,’ and combine this with the concept of lifnim mishurat hadin, going beyond the letter of the law, when it comes to employment and how we treat our staff,” Adam Grossman, director of North American audience engagement at URJ, told eJP.

By providing equitable benefits for all workers and cultivating a safe workplace where employees can express concerns without fear of retaliation, he said, it merges HR with Jewish values. “When organizations invest in employee well-being and invest in HR, it increases employee satisfaction and strengthens their interactions across their community,” Grossman said.

Offering better health care to employees was one of the main attractions for Jake Cohen, the executive director of Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, Texas, who was part of the initial cohort of congregations involved. He too had been overwhelmed by the administrative burden and wanted paperwork to go smoother for employees who were still filling out paper forms, which were bulging through drawers in his office.

He had contacted a PEO — professional employer organization — to do HR for them, but working with a PEO was too pricey for Congregation Beth Israel because it charged for part-time employees the same as regular employees, who needed more services.

JHR works around this issue by having part-time employees and full-time employees work with separate agencies, High5 and Insperity, with the agency managing part-time employees managing fewer services, such as health care, allowing organizations that would not be able to afford these services to offer them.

“We’ve been through a lot as a Jewish community in the last couple of years, last half decade,” Cohen told eJP. “We’ve been through a lot as a global community and American community. These are really tumultuous times that we live in. The thing that we would hope would be the last thing on folk’s minds is trying to navigate the byzantine world of HR. If we can make that burden just a little bit easier on our synagogue professionals, then we’ve done a mitzvah.”

One hurdle any HR department faces, especially one located off-site, is earning staff’s trust.

“HR departments do whatever their bosses say,” Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, told eJP. “They are not per se looking after the employees, especially if the employees’ interests conflict with what the bosses want.”

HR can’t be cut and pasted from one synagogue to another. “Really recognizing the needs and expectations of employees is hard, and actually could take quite a lot of time,” Stefan Stern, the author of How to Be a Better Leader and a visiting professor at Bayes Business School, City, University of London, told eJP. “There isn’t always time to listen to everybody individually.”

In an ideal world, HR would absolutely overlap with Jewish values, he said. In Jewish communities, “education is so important, knowledge is so important and [so are] community and responsibility… You could see why there might be an overlap in compassionate management, and, even to use an old-fashioned word, paternalistic, the idea that the employer has a regard for you and the concern for you and has a responsibility towards you… The spirit of HR, in theory, is not always about headcount reduction. We hope it’s about enabling, fostering. We hope it’s about skills development and career management. In practice, we don’t always get that.”

But such an overlap can happen if an organization and HR agency work together with sensitivity and skill, he said. 

Since launching last April, the 12 congregations using JHR have reported having less paperwork. More time to spend on other tasks. Less stress. Better health care. They are focusing more on personal relationships within the agency and partners in the larger Jewish world, Grossman said.

“Our goal at JHR is to provide an option,” he said. “My hope with JHR is that we raise all Jewish community boats together. My hope is that JHR plays a vital role in strengthening relationships with its staff, and by extension, creating a more engaged Jewish community, more deeply connected Jewish community, and more staff committed to staying longer within the Jewish community.”

Quality HR may not be on the top of the list of things funders think to support, but it’s essential, Mael said. “It’s foundational stuff that could really help congregations be more effective.”