HIAS lays off 12% of US staff after ‘unsustainable’ spending
The refugee advocacy group said it was forced into the move after discovering financial mismanagement
Activists hold a banner during a demonstration organized by HIAS, founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, in 2017. The organization laid off 12% of its American workforce this week after discovering financial mismanagement. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld, Louis KeeneApril 11, 2024
HIAS, the Jewish refugee advocacy group, laid off 12% of its workforce based in the United States on Tuesday after discovering errors that led to “unsustainable” spending late last year.
“We have made the challenging but necessary decision to reduce our workforce,” Beth Oppenheim, the organization’s chief advancement officer, said in an email. She wrote that the layoffs were made to preserve “as much of our critical work as possible while ensuring HIAS’s financial health into the future.”
[Know anything about the layoffs at HIAS? Contact reporter Arno Rosenfeld at arno@forward.com.]
The organization declined to say which departments were affected by layoffs but employees who worked in advocacy and donor relations roles for HIAS marked on LinkedIn that they stopped working there this month.
Lara Moninghoff, who had served as chief financial officer at HIAS since April 2022, is no longer in that role. She was removed from the organization’s website and stated on LinkedIn that she had transitioned to a “senior consultant” for HIAS last month.
HIAS said she no longer had any financial management responsibilities. Moninghoff did not respond to a request for comment.
Oppenheim said that the budget crunch necessitating the layoffs was the result of the organization spending too much of its “unrestricted resources” late last year “due to a combination of technology transition and human error that our internal controls failed to identify.”
“There was no mismanagement of donor funds and HIAS remains a responsible steward of donor funding around the world,” she added.
Founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in the 1880s, HIAS has shifted much of its focus in recent years to helping refugees and asylum seekers domestically and around the world and has more than 1,000 international staff.
It has become a major target for the far right, who believe it is part of a conspiracy to bring immigrants to the U.S. The man who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 ranted against the organization. And right-wing influencers have redoubled their attacks on it in recent weeks, claiming that maps it displayed for migrants in Central America were directing them to the U.S. The organization said they were only intended to identify aid stations.
HIAS has seen its revenue triple from around $40 million in 2014 to nearly $150 million in 2022, the last year for which data was publicly available, as it became a major recipient of donations from American Jews and others concerned about harsh immigration policies implemented during the Trump administration.
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