National Year In Review

NEIL RUBIN

Contributing Editor

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After this
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T

his was a weird Jewish year.
Other years were over-
whelmed by the crisis of
intermarriage and assimila-
tion. Then came the continuing mas-
sive exodus of Jews from the former
Soviet Union. It was followed by the
remarkably tragic assassination of an
Israeli prime minister by an allegedly
Orthodox Jew. And two years ago the
Jewish world stewed in the anger of
the Jewish Disunity Wars.
While the past 12 months featured
the fallout of all that, it offered a lot
more. The mixture of sounds emerg-
ing from these Jewish trends and
events leaves ones wondering about
the direction of the Jewish people, of
their ongoing symphony of modern
Jewish identity
To be certain, the year featured sad
and even ugly moments. At the Jewish
Federation movement's Indianapolis-
hosted annual convention, a place to
take the pulse of North American
Jewish life, Israel's prime minister had
an embarrassingly cool reception.
Before arriving, Binyamin Netanyahu
had hinted he would support pending
legislation to codify Orthodoxy's
monopoly on religious life in Israel.
Delegates were angry. And they
weren't about to embrace Israel's
leader, as they usually do.
Adding another discordant note,
President Bill Clinton decided that
Netanyahu didn't need a White House
invitation. It was nor-so-subtle pun-
ishment for Israel's perceived stalling
of the Mideast peace talks.
For the next few months delega-
tions of Reform and Conservative rab-
bis shuttled to Jerusalem to protest the
pending "conversion legislation,"
which would invalidate the legal
standina b of their colleagues in Israel.
But by year's end, for the second con-
secutive year, the conversion law went
to the trash heap.

InE eanwhile, in communi-
ties across America, the
musicians of Jewish life
played on. Some of
them started looking at the notes a lit-
tle differently, examining the unity
aspect of what they did. It seemed
almost the opposite of what was hap-
pening in Israel.
More importantly, thousands of

9/18
1998

54 Detroit Jewish News

small, intense gatherings, jam sessions
if you will, kept taking place in syna-
gogues, agencies and federations.
There, the shift away from the tradi-
tional agenda of defending, Israel,
fighting anti-Semitism, and rescuing
Jews in peril continued. The focus was
on building life at home.
And other significant initiatives
were launched. As but one example,
the Avi Chai Foundation has started a
series of grants intended to bring
down the absurd cost of Jewish private
school education.
The Internet continued its explo-
sion of offerings, at one point even
featuring a global Jewish Web week.
In cyberspace's anything-goes universe,
unknown numbers of Jews are explor-
ing their identity in chat rooms and
through the now virtually countless
Web sites for everything imaginably
Jewish.
And this summer waves of kids
enjoyed Jewish summer camps and,
during the year, youth groups, both
the unsung, under-funded and under-
staffed heroes of Jewish life. Adults
kept turning out for informal Jewish
education. And Jewish pre-schools in
America were overflowing.
In the need to fund it all, the
demands for money shot up. But the
bright note in that is that ifs because
the Jewish marketplace has said, "Yes,
we want more.
Indeed, more money heads toward
Israel and Jewish causes than ever. It
just isn't happening in traditional
ways. The New Israel Fund, NIAZON:
A Jewish Response To Hunger, the
Abraham Foundation, and countless
others are changing the funding and
programming priorities of modern
Jewry. Then there's the real secret of
American Jewish life — Jewish federa-
tion endowment funds, places soon to
be the home of billion of dollars.
It all means that we are setting the
groundwork for a new American
Jewish community — one that, per-
haps in 40 or 50 years, will be day-
school educated, highly Israel aware
and strongly synagogue-based. Of
course, those synagogues will look like
nothing like the ones of today. They
will be post-denominational, focusing
on creative education, outreach and
family experience.
With all this in mind, the underly-
ing theme of American Jewry's sym-
phony seems to be heard by more
people than in recent years. They are

