The YM-YWHA building at 199 Scoles Ave., Clifton Josh Lipowsky

One year ago the YM-YWHA of Greater Clifton-Passaic celebrated its grand reopening, and the dedication of a newly renovated half-million-dollar playground. One month ago the Jewish Federation of Greater Clifton-Passaic, facing budget deficits and major drops in its fund-raising campaign in recent years, decided to sell the Y, a 105-year-old institution and the only Jewish community center in the Passaic-Clifton area.

The Y, also known as the Tri-County JCC, houses the federation, Jewish Family Service, the Riskin Children’s Center, and the Holocaust Resource Center. Federation leaders say they intend that these agencies would remain open after the sale of the building but remained noncommittal about Y programming beyond September 2011. The Y still expects to offer camp for the summer of 2011.

The board voted to sell the building at its July meeting and put the building on the market later that month. Community members did not learn about the move, however, until they received a letter in early August.

“The decision has been brewing for several years,” Ed Schey, the federation’s executive director, told this newspaper last week. “It became very difficult these past several years to maintain the services we want to at the Y. We just don’t have the wherewithal to continue.”

He pointed to a diminishing donor base as the result of a donor’s death or relocation out of state. Late donors’ families often don’t continue the tradition of contributing, he said, while those who move away shift their dollars to local charities.

The changing demographics of Passaic — the city has experienced a boom in its Orthodox population in recent years and is home to 10 Orthodox synagogues, while Clifton has one Conservative shul — has also played a role. While Y leaders estimated at least 50 percent of the Y’s users are Orthodox, the federation has not been successful in fund-raising in that community.

Ten years ago, the federation’s campaign raised more than $1 million. Schey would not provide specifics but said the campaign today is about half of that. According to 2008 tax forms, the latest on file with the website Guidestar.org, the federation collected $5,162,965 in total revenue between Oct. 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, 2008, but faced expenses of $5,583,671 — a deficit of more than $400,000.

Just to open the doors of the Y — paying for electricity, heating, and other basic needs — costs approximately $600,000 a year, according to the Y’s executive director, Kenneth Mandel. With the federation facing a $1.5 million budget deficit, he said he was saddened by the decision but understood it.

“I look at this building and say this is a community asset,” he said. “By selling this building you’re never going to be able to have a building like this again.”

The Y has approximately 1,300 members including family units, and Mandel estimated that about 1,000 people pass through the doors each day. This year’s summer camp is at capacity, with 600 children enrolled.

The Y’s operating budget is $2.7 million; it receives $178,000 from the federation and the rest is raised from other sources. Each year the staff wonders if that will be the final year, Mandel said, but various grants and last-minute donations have kept the building afloat. The Y staff took a 10 percent pay cut last year, representing a savings of $200,000, Mandel said.

The federation had looked at merging with one of its neighboring federations, but plans to merge with the Jewish Federation of North Jersey in Wayne fell apart when that organization merged with the UJA of Bergen County & North Hudson to form UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey. From 2002 to 2008 the Passaic-Clifton federation held conversations with the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest, but those talks eventually broke down.

“We didn’t want to be in a position next September to say, ‘We’re closing tomorrow,’” said Mark Levenson, who concluded his eight-year presidency of the Passaic-Clifton federation in June. “We have been deliberating for a long time to come to what I call a soft landing.”

The 7-acre property went on the market last month, Levenson said, although he would not disclose the asking price or the broker.

The federation is not shutting down, Levenson emphasized, acknowledging rumors that followed the sale’s announcement.

“The campaign will continue; what federation does will continue,” he said. “We are not closing the federation. The federation absolutely is in control and the implementer of this decision.”

The federation board is open to ideas to save the Y, Levenson said, but only a large infusion of dollars will work.

“Unless there is some real concrete plan of real funding to help address the gap in keeping the building going, good intentions just don’t get us there,” he said. “We need actual real cash to keep the building going.”

When Mitch Morrison, a Passaic resident who is vice president and group editor of CSP Information Group, received the federation’s letter, he quickly began to mobilize efforts to save the Y.

As of Monday, when he spoke to this paper from a business meeting in Utah, he had been trying to organize a meeting with federation leaders for the end of this week. An initial e-mail asking people for help has attracted lots of attention, he said, and he’d like the federation to examine all options from the community.

“Let’s pause,” he said. “Let’s take a deep breath and let’s regroup and see if we can create a model that is truly representative of a broader Jewish community and can we do it under a financial model that not only allows the institution to survive but to thrive.”

Passaic has experienced a demographic change, not a demographic decline, Morrison said. That separates the Passaic-Clifton Y from other agencies in decline across the country. He envisions new models of operation and outreach for the Y that bring in the Orthodox, the Russian émigre´s, the non-affiliated, and Jews from smaller communities nearby.

“If you take the attitude of ‘let’s rebuild this from scratch, what kind of fund-raising model could you create,’ you could potentially create something very dynamic and robust,” he said.

Schey said that the federation would negotiate with a buyer to see if Jewish Family Service, the Riskin Children’s Center, and the Holocaust Resource Center could stay in the building. Whether the federation ends up renting space back from a buyer or if the building will be razed depends on who buys it, he said.

“The executive committee of the federation and board of trustees of the federation will review carefully all of the proposals and make a decision that’s in the best interest of the Jewish community of Clifton-Passaic,” he added.

Edith Sobel, the former editor of the Jewish Community News, praised the federation and its relationship with the paper when the JCN was housed at the Y.

“It was a very wonderful experience for me,” she said.

Valerie Sharfman, director of the Holocaust Resource Center, declined comment.

Jewish Family Services receives $125,000, or about 10 percent of its annual budget, from the federation, which has been “a pretty secure funder,” said Esther East, executive director of Jewish Family Service.

“We are very saddened by the fact that the financial difficulties have resulted in this loss,” she said. “We’re losing the one communal institution in the Clifton-Passaic community where Jewish people cross-denominationally come together. That’s a big loss.”

The Jewish Community Center at 199 Scoles Avenue, Clifton, is being phased out.

By 1904, teenagers in Passaic’s growing Jewish community were finding that synagogues — the traditional center of Jewish life for their European-born parents — no longer met their needs. And so, following a pattern emerging in Jewish communities across the country, a group of high-school students formed the city’s first Y. Three years later, The Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Passaic was formally incorporated under state law. It eventually merged with a YWHA formed in March, 1905. The story is recorded in “Jewish Roots: A History of the Jewish Community of Passaic and Environs,” published in 1959 by the Jewish Community Council of Passaic.

Last week, the Jewish Federation of Greater Clifton-Passaic announced the closing of its YM-YWHA — the direct successor to that institution. Doors to the Y’s pool and fitness center at 199 Scoles Ave., Clifton, will shut today, June 24, and the rest of the Y’s operations will phase out during the month of July.

“The Y Nursery School has ended its program for the year and will not re-start,” said the federation’s president, Joan Gottlieb. “Day care will continue at its present location through July 22.” Only the day camp — the most profitable of the Y’s programs — will make it through the summer, ending on Aug. 19 as scheduled, with no home for the foreseeable future. The day camp, all of whose campers are Orthodox, reflects the changed demographics of the area’s Jewish community. While profitable, the camp is self-supporting, providing no funds for other federation activities.

When the Y — also known as the Tri-County JCC — moved from downtown Passaic to Clifton in 1976, the transition was funded by contributions from a then diverse and generous Jewish community. “Since then, a lot of our big givers either moved away or passed away,” said Gottlieb, “and the new [Orthodox] Jewish community has neither the financial ability nor the willingness to support the federation and the Y. We’ve been running at a deficit for years,” she added.

Recognizing its problems, the federation pursued efforts to merge, first with the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest — encompassing Essex, Morris, Sussex, and part of Union counties — and later, the Jewish Federation of North Jersey in Wayne. Neither effort was successful.

The Y’s closing is the latest chapter in a saga that officially began a year ago when the financially strapped federation put its 60,000 square-foot building on the market. The property sits on seven acres, comprising a playground renovated just a year ago. The sale has been under contract to a prospective buyer (The Learning Center for Exceptional Children) since early this year. Both parties say they expect closing this summer, and the buyer has indicated it will open the fitness center and pool to the public at what Gottlieb called “reasonable rates.”

The building will not be vacated until the closing occurs, and in the event it does not, the JCC says it has other options to pursue.

Real estate negotiations are also at the heart of the Y’s closing. “It’s a disappointment because a month and a half ago, the federation voted to continue funding the Y for another year,” said Mark Levenson, who ended eight years as federation president last year and is president-elect of the New Jersey State Association of Jewish Federations. “We felt strongly about providing the Y’s resources to the community for another year, and we were helping Y chairman Kenneth Mandel with negotiations to continue to operate in a different building, retaining many of the services it provides with day care in one building, senior services in another.”

When negotiations with a third party fell through two weeks ago, a letter went out informing the community of the closing of day care and the Riskin Early Learning Center. The Y’s senior services program will be administered by Jewish Family Service, a former federation division that, according to Levenson, was deliberately spun off as a separate agency so that it could continue its work regardless of the federation’s financial status or location. In fact, JFS is also negotiating to rent office space in Clifton with enough room to house the federation, originally scheduled to relocate with the Y. The Holocaust Resource Center, which occupies space in the JCC building, is also looking for a new space. “We are in the midst of finding an appropriate home for their art collection and book collection — hopefully in the same place,” Gottlieb said.

When Ed Schey, the federation’s executive director for 10 years, announced his retirement as of July 1, rumors circulated that the federation would cease operations.

“The federation will continue to exist, but in a different form,” Gottlieb explained. “What I’m hoping is that without the overhead of the building, Super Sunday and our fundraising efforts will enable us to build up our funds and increase support of our beneficiaries which, in recent years, have been considerably reduced.” At the end, Gottlieb added, “We didn’t give any money to Israel or other institutions we used to support.”

The Scoles Avenue building was reportedly put on the market for an asking price of $6 million last year. The federation, Gottlieb said, will realize far less than that amount.

While the board is still in the process of deciding how to use any profits, “First of all, we have two very large lines of credit to pay off, and second we will be helping JFS to get up and running in its new location,” she added.

Reflecting on the conditions that brought the Clifton-Passaic JCC to this point, Gottlieb recalled the social conditions that led to the Y’s creation more than a century ago.

“One of the reasons we needed a Y was so that our children could meet and socialize with other Jewish children. That doesn’t seem to be a concern in the Orthodox community,” she said.

Added Levenson: “Everyone at the federation level worked very hard for a different kind of outcome, but it just wasn’t possible. We spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on this — looked under every rock, went to every constituency. We kept going longer than many people thought we could, but the federation has been on a changing ground for the past 15 years. Evolution and change happen.”

Still, as he prepares to assume the presidency of the state association, Levenson remains optimistic. “The final chapter has not been written,” he said.