identity
Blend in or stand out? I BY JONATHAN ROSENBLUM
LAST YEAR, I HELPED LEAD A GROUP OF JOINT
Distribution Committee (JDC) donors and
board members on a tour of the Chareidi
community. We visited the magnificent
Beit Knesset of Belz, which can seat up to
8 000 people, and the surrounding complex, which is buzzing 24 hours a day.
From there we went to one of the largest
Beis Yaakov seminaries, and heard about
the impact of some JDC projects in the
school. (I, for one, was pretty shocked to
54 JEWISH LIFE
ISSUE 82
learn that 18 girls in the computer programme reached the finals of a Microsoft
competition for developing apps, and that
12 of those apps are now available from
the Microsoft app store.) And finally, we
THE KEY TO RETAINING ANY UNIQUE IDENTITY IS A
SENSE OF ONE’S DISTINCTIVENESS. ONCE, THAT
AWARENESS WAS AUTOMATIC FOR JEWS.
PHOTOGRAPH: BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM
JEWISH
visited a Chareidi employment centre started by the JDC and since taken over and expanded by the government.
While giving an overview of the Chareidi
community, I shared with the group some
of my personal background. As a consequence, at the second stop, a young man
about 20 years younger than anyone else
on the tour approached me to discuss some
commonalities in our backgrounds. He too
was a law school graduate, had practised
for a few years in a major firm, and was
now in Israel considering aliyah and thinking about becoming a Reform rabbi.
He posed the following question: “How
can a non-Orthodox Jewish identity be preserved, especially outside of Israel?” I wish I
knew the answer to that question. For I have
no desire to see non-Orthodox Jews disappear and simply meld into their host populations, leaving behind only a DNA trace of 3
300 years of Jewish history. Davka as an Orthodox Jew who believes that the Jewish
people were given the Torah as a nation, I
feel that every single Jew is crucial to the
fulfilment of our national mission.
But the truth is neither sociology, nor
history, nor logic, bode well for the longrun preservation of a non-Orthodox Jewish identity. According to the recent PEW
Study, one-third of American Jews under
35 say they have no religion at all. And the
intermarriage rate among the non-Orthodox is 71%, which means that over four out
of five marriages involving non-Orthodox
Jews are intermarriages.
In Alan Dershowitz’s 1998 work: The
Vanishing American Jew, there appears one
chart. That chart shows how many selfidentifying Jews will remain from 100 unaffiliated, Reform, Conservative Jews over
two or three generations, based on the intermarriage and birth rates at the time. Of
the hundred unaffiliated Jews (currently
the largest segment of American Jewry)
only 13 Jewishly identified grandchildren