Pioneer graduates of College for Senior Civil Servants meet with Rivlin

The pioneer graduates of the first class met with President Reuven Rivlin on Thursday after completing a 10-month course.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
Pioneer graduates of College for Senior Civil Servants meet with Rivlin (photo credit: MARC NEYMAN/GPO)
Pioneer graduates of College for Senior Civil Servants meet with Rivlin
(photo credit: MARC NEYMAN/GPO)
Following his appointment as Civil Service Commissioner in May 2011, Moshe Dayan set about devising and implementing reforms with the aim of filling senior civil service positions with the best possible human resources to help facilitate proper governance and to avoid pitfalls not seen, or ignored, by politicians.
These reforms included the establishment of the College for Senior Civil Servants, incorporating the various disciplines used in government ministries and organizations as well as in institutions under each ministerial aegis.
The pioneer graduates of the first class met with President Reuven Rivlin on Thursday after completing a 10-month course.
“We are in an uneasy period of defining the roles of senior civil servants compared to elected officials,” Dayan told Rivlin, as he presented some 30 civil servants to him – among them people with expert knowledge and experience in healthcare, social welfare, law and local government.
Thinking ahead, Dayan was confident that in the years to come the college will earn a respected place in the eyes of both the public and the government.
“We will get better quality governance as a result,” he said. There are 850 senior civil servants all told, he added, “and they have the responsibility of the functioning of the state on their shoulders.”
Taking into account their collective value, Dayan declared that these human resources were far more important to the country than natural resources.
Rivlin told the graduates that they were the regulators in a democratic system.
Speaking as a former member of Knesset, Rivlin said: “You give us not the privilege conferred on us by the public but the duty, by telling us what is forbidden and what is taboo.”
Commending Dayan for his achievements in his post, Rivlin said: “A strong civil service commissioner is the barrier between the administration and the public.” He was happy, he continued, that the civil service network reinvents itself from time to time so as to safeguard the interests of the public, and to ensure that the needs of the nation take precedence over political interests.
Conceding that politicians who are stopped in their tracks by senior civil servants may ask who needs them, the fact of the matter, said Rivlin, is that “I don’t see how we can run the state without you. You are the backbone of our democracy.”
Speaking on behalf of her fellow graduates, Dr. Orly Weinstein, director of the Division of Government Medical Centers in the Health Ministry, said that it had been a wonderful opportunity for all of them to learn from one another. She also emphasized the importance of bringing more government services to peripheral communities, and for senior public servants to be paradigms for the people with whom they work.