New Jersey Jewish News
MetroWest Feature
Israelis, practicing religious pluralism, sample life in MetroWest community
They sat around a horseshoe of tables in Whippany, 19 people whose lives normally have little in common.
Among them were a drug counselor and a film director, educators and elected officials, a business consultant and a television anchor.
Some are deeply religious, others resolutely secular, still others insistent that their own identities could not be easily labeled.
What drew them together at the Gebroe & Hammer Family Conference Center on the Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus on May 15 were the three things that bind them — despite their differences. All of them are Israeli, all are Jews, and all took part in a program called Gvanim B’Yachad — a Hebrew term meaning “all colors united,” in this case the colors of religious and cultural identity — that is being nurtured by MetroWest’s Religious Pluralism Subcommittee.
It is the first year that participants in Gvanim have visited New Jersey as part of a trip that takes them as well to San Francisco and New York, where Jewish federations also actively promote religious pluralism.
In MetroWest, the program began in 1998, as Israel prepared to observe its 50th anniversary.
“It should have been a cause for celebration, but instead it was the most divisive year I have ever encountered for Jews in the Diaspora,” said Max Kleinman, executive vice president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey.
The reason, he said, was “the controversy over Who is a Jew?” triggered by religious members of the Knesset. That year, the federation decided to appropriate funds “for the different religious streams in Israel” including the Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox as well as secular alternative programs and options, so Israelis would “know there were alternatives to the Orthodoxy they rejected.”
In addition, said Kleinman, other programs were set up for Israelis of various persuasions “to get together and better learn about Jews, about the fact that Judaism belongs to all Jewish people, and that more unites us than divides us.”
“Religious pluralism is an existential question of Jewish identity so critical to the well-being of the state that it should rise to the top of the Diaspora community’s agenda,” said Gary Aidekman of Madison, chair of MetroWest’s Religious Pluralism Subcommittee.
“If common ground among Israelis is not found and not advanced, there is serious risk of their society rending apart,” he warned.
To Arthur Sandman, UJC MetroWest’s associate executive vice president for program services, “religious pluralism might in some ways be the most important work we do to help Israel remain internally secure, so that it presents a strong external front against its enemies.”
For the visiting Israelis at the end of a three-day tour of schools, synagogues, and agencies in the MetroWest community, impressions were as varied as their many lifestyles and philosophies.
Chaya Bernfeld, a senior director of the municipal education department in the MetroWest sister city of Rishon Letzion, said she “didn’t know what I was going to see in the Diaspora. But the most important impression I got was that you have to work very hard to be a Jew here. To build a community and make a significant Jewish life here is much harder than in our community.”
“There is the creation of many, many ghettoes inside Israel,” said Ukraine-born Vadim Blumin, who works with young immigrants in Israel. “We are losing a sense of solidarity and of being a just society. Today in Israel you have this dichotomy between the Orthodox establishment, which uses religion for political aspirations,” and the non-Orthodox population. “Here I feel that the sense of Judaism is much deeper. It has a sense of culture and the past. I think we have much to learn from the American Jews.”
Tamar Ish-Shalom, a morning TV news anchor, said she is “a Jewish person from Israel” who is “trying to see for myself what is my Jewish identity and to make it more solid and stable.” Ish-Shalom told NJ Jewish News she “will come back to Israel and try to promote Jewish pluralism.”
While she noticed a sense of cooperation among secular American Jews and those in different religious streams, Ish-Shalom said, “In Israel it is pretty difficult to find an Orthodox cooperating with a Reform person, and here it is something that is very acceptable.”
Noam Hess, who works with Israeli heroin and cocaine addicts in a substance abuse prevention program, has a different view. “If you would push me to the corner I would say I am an Orthodox Jew. I don’t think the Conservative and Reform movements can be a success in Israel. They are much too American.”
The issue of teaching identity is a special challenge to Ronit Elbaz, principal of an Orthodox elementary school near Tel Aviv.
Elbaz said she experiences a sense of pluralistic diversity in her own classrooms, especially because a considerable percentage of her student body are immigrants from Ethiopia.
“Most of my populations are not religious but their parents registered them because they want that their sons and daughters to know a little bit of tradition and Halacha and holidays. I think in their houses they don’t have a fully Jewish life, and I want them to be more Jewish. At the same time, I teach them to be Israelis.”
Ofra Sarel-Koren, a documentary filmmaker whose most recent movie, she said, dealt “with the question of life after death,” viewed her trip as an opportunity “to research the Jewish communities in the United States.”
“Maybe I consider myself as Masorti,” the Hebrew term for the Conservative movement. “But I don’t like the labels of ‘religious’ and ‘secular.’ We are in Israel because we are Jews.”
Alon Schuster, head of the regional council of Sha’ar Hanegev, 10 kibbutzim near the Gaza border, said the MetroWest “investment make us much more committed to our heritage, our history, and to the common history of Jews all over the world.”
According to Amir Shacham, director of the MetroWest office in Jerusalem, “It’s so important that the representatives from various Israeli groups are sitting together. Nowhere in Israel — in no other program — is such a diverse group meeting together to discuss their Jewish identity. The fact that they are hearing from various lecturers and studying together with rabbis and academics from different streams of Jewish thought is giving them wider perspectives than they would ever get in Israel. The trip here really opened their eyes.”
Shacham told NJJN that he could “really see the transformation in some of them from 10 days ago” when they gathered for their departure at Ben-Gurion Airport. “This really works,” he said.
A prime example was an improbable bond that has
developed between Noa Tzuk — who is co-principal of an eight-year-old school in the Galil where 200 Israeli and Arab children learn side by side in both Arabic and Hebrew — and Assaf Cohen, who directs the education department in Gush Etzion, a block of 18 settlements on the West Bank.
Tzuk believes that “being a principal of a school with Jews and Arabs is the most Jewish thing I can be. For me it is the only way we can live in peace.”
The West Bank settlers in Israel, she said, “don’t accept me, and I don’t accept them…, but here is the only opportunity for us to have a real dialogue.”
After 10 days of traveling in America, Cohen described Tzuk as “one of my best friends now. I cannot say the trip changed me, but it developed me. It gave me the chance to see myself much more deeply and to stand among my ideas and education and traditions with humanity’s point of views. I am not another person since I came here, but I am a much more rich person.”
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