obituaries
Kiev Online
Website reconnects
young Jews — one post at a time.
Continued from page 53
in the former Soviet Union and one of the
most highly assimilated.
According to 2008 figures from the
Jewish Agency, 80 percent of Jewish new-
lyweds in the former Soviet Union married
a non-Jew, a figure dramatically higher
than the rate in the United States. The
vast majority of Ukraine's 360,000 Jews
are non-observant; and only a small frac-
tion is affiliated with the organized Jewish
community, which many young Jews find
obsolete and rife with internal discord.
Social networks, Kozlovskiy says, have
the potential to keep Jews, intermarried
and not, connected to Jewish life.
"If we don't reach out to the unaffiliated,
they will assimilate and will be lost to the
Jewish people Kozlovskiy said. "The fact
that our website isn't affiliated with any
denomination or Jewish institution has
allowed us to be a portal for any Jew"
Jewishnet functions much like any
other social networking platform, allow-
ing users to post news stories, share tips,
ask questions, connect with old friends
and promote events. But mindful of the
limitations of many web-based networking
sites, organizers of Jewishnet have taken
steps to provide users with opportunities
for real-life engagement with the Jewish
community.
A platform called Juice, which is run
partly through Jewishnet, invites young
Jews — many of them young and unaffili-
ated — to meetings with community lead-
ers, Jewish businessmen and journalists.
Reports of the events often are published
on Jewishnet, and users can submit ques-
tions online in advance that are asked by
moderators during the actual event.
One of the first Juice talks brought
dozens of young Jews last November to
a talk with three rabbis, including the
chief rabbi of Ukraine, Yaakov Bleich.
The goal, according to Juice co-organizer
Inna Yampolskaya, was to build bridges
between young Jewish professionals and
the establishment from which many feel
FROM THE FAMILIES WE SERVE
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that helped us resolve many of
the planning issues we had to
deal with. I really appreciated
your attention to details.
Everything was so personalized."
We appreciate the feedback we
receive from our community.
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54 August 8 • 2013
.1N
Obituaries
Juice Internet co-organizers Inna Yampolskaya and Igor Kozlovskiy, Ukrainian Chief
Rabbi Yaakov Bleich and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's Lilya
Vendrova at a Juice event in Kiev, November 2012
estranged.
Those in attendance proceeded to grill
the rabbis with questions, asking why
synagogue seats are sold and why phi-
lanthropists fund projects in Israel when
there are so many unaddressed challenges
at home. Some questions were submitted
anonymously online because participants
felt uncomfortable posing them publicly.
"It was a unique experience because
it was the first time participants could
ask a rabbi anything they wanted:' said
Yampolskaya, one of Juice's volunteer orga-
nizers. "Transparency is new in Ukraine,
where everything, including Jewish life,
used to work top to bottom, not the other
way around."
Liliya Vendrova, an employee of the
Joint Distribution Committee's Kiev office,
uses the site to find news and make con-
tacts for events she organizes.
The site also has enabled Russian-
speaking Jews who live abroad to keep
abreast of developments at home. But it
also functions in reverse, permitting users
to connect with wider developments in the
Jewish world.
"Many people their age are not interest-
ed in participating in organized Jewish life,
and they are reaching out to those people
Bleich said. "One of the reasons that this is
succeeding is the authenticity."
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