Israel Matzav: Facing the truth

Facing the truth

This post is a little different than the normal fare. Although the post was prompted by something that has happened in Israel, it's not directly connected to Israeli politics, except to the extent that the current Chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, feels a strong sense of obligation for ensuring the future of the Jewish people - perhaps a stronger sense than his predecessor.

I'd like to show you a chart. If you have trouble reading it, you can find the chart here.

For those having difficulty seeing the chart, the columns are headed Secular, Reform, Conservative, Centrist Orthodox and Hasidic/Yeshiva Orthodox (or what we might call ultra-Orthodox). Each column starts with 100 people (each little person in the square represents 10 people). Each row represents a generation and the number of people represents the number of Jews in that generation. The bottom two rows provide the inter-marriage rate and the average number of children per couple for each group in each column. The results should be self-explanatory.

The chart is based on United States statistics. In Europe, the statistics may be slightly less dismal because anti-Semitism - which is much stronger in Europe than in the US - tends to force Jews to identify as Jews. I have not seen statistics for Europe, and so I do not know for sure. For Israeli Jews who remain in Israel, our statistics are much better. We have higher birth rates, even among the secular (approaching three children per couple), and because the Arabs are considered enemies and because there are relatively few non-Arab non-Jews here, the inter-marriage rate is lower, regardless of how strong your religious identification.

The upshot of the chart should be obvious: Your odds of having Jewish grandchildren (something all parents wanted when I was growing up) are much better if you are Centrist Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, and the more you tend towards the ultra-Orthodox side of that spectrum (there is no bright red line that separates Centrist from ultra), the more grandchildren you are likely to have.

But there are two other factoids that don't appear on the chart that bear pointing out. One is that if you live in Israel, your chances of having Jewish grandchildren without being Orthodox are much better than they are in the US. And if you live in the United States but spent a significant chunk of time in Israel, the chances are greater that you will feel a stronger connection to the Jewish people and will remain Jewish and have Jewish children (giving you a shot at Jewish grandchildren).

With these last two factoids in mind, the Jewish Agency has taken upon itself to start a program called Masa.

If you follow that link, you will see that Masa is directed at Jewish university students with a view to getting them to spend their semester or year abroad in Israel. It is not directed at the two Orthodox groups and it doesn't need to be. For the last 25-30 years, nearly every Orthodox kid between the ages of 18-21 spends at least six months to a year in Israel. Instead, Masa is directed at the non-Orthodox kids, who might otherwise never make it to Israel, except possibly as part of a Birthright tour. It's meant as a follow-up to Birthright. But because it lasts for a longer period, Masa has the opportunity to do a better job than Birthright does in instilling a connection to Israel and the Jewish people.

Why am I raising this today? I'm not raising it because it's ten days to Rosh HaShanna (the Jewish New Year), although that should certainly be a time for all of us to evaluate honestly our efforts at passing on our Jewish values to our children. I'm raising it because of this advertisement on Israeli television, which caught the ire of both Shmuel Rosner and JJ Goldberg.

Read All at :

Israel Matzav: Facing the truth