A Changing Jewish Community

Several months ago, I joined Facebook. To date, I have exactly 150 friends based in 25 cities and towns, and am part of seven different networks on four different continents. I am also part of twelve groups, which link me in with people I was friendly with during my teens, people with whom I spent my gap year, people with whom I was in a youth movement, people with whom I helped establish a minyan, people with whom I studied, people with whom I worked, and people involved in various British, Israeli, American and global initiatives that I quite like the sound of. And I’m not even particularly committed to this whole endeavour – in fact, by most people’s standards, I seem to be thoroughly anti-social.

My interest in Facebook emerged partly because I thought it might be fun, but partly because it – and social networking sites in general – are really interesting sociological phenomena. The technology involved allows for entirely new forms of connections to be made and new forms of community to be constructed. The construction, maintenance and growth of community are topics that have intrigued me for some time now, and have formed an important part of both my professional and academic work. I am particularly intrigued to explore how technology, and a variety of other new trends may be impacting some of the dynamics within the Jewish community, and what might be done in response.

Joining Facebook coincided, by chance, with my taking up a new position running JDC’s International Centre for Community Development. JDC-ICCD is a new initiative designed to provide data, insight and training to Jewish communal professionals in Europe and beyond, in order to help them work more effectively in the field. As part of my induction process, I have been travelling around Europe to learn more about what is going on in different Jewish communities. This experience has allowed me to meet with numerous interesting characters, encounter a number of intriguing phenomena, and ask a whole set of questions that previously wouldn’t have even occurred to me. Yet when I look back on the past few months, three particular experiences keep coming back to me, opening up lines of enquiry that appear to strike at the very heart of the future of the Jewish People.

The first took place whilst I was attending a JDC seminar in Oxford. There I met with two Jewish community professionals from Argentina. As part of the programme, they presented an initiative they have set up with the somewhat unfortunate name “YOK” (but pronounced “jok” with a soft “j” as in the French “je.”) YOK has become most well-known for a large-scale Jewish street festival it runs annually in the fashionable Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Palermo. Last year, it attracted an estimated 16,000 people, and had 40 different Jewish food and craft stalls, plus 13 different musical performances. 1,746 people entered its Urban Passover Gefilte Fish competition, which was eventually won by a 73 year-old grandmother. The event took place just before Pesach, so Pesach-related food, gifts and information was available more or less everywhere, ranging from boxes of matzah to kneidl-shaped soap. And given that it was a street festival held out in the open, there were even a few things available for non-Jews, most notably the item that ultimately turned out to be the best-selling t-shirt. Its slogan? “Orgullo Goy” – Goy Pride. Watching a film of the event, it was difficult not to be impressed by the sense of fun that permeated the entire event, and the fact that so many normally uninvolved Jews seemed to be revelling, albeit for a short time, in their Jewishness.

In the break after the presentation, I asked one of the organisers about security arrangements. He told me there were none. The community’s head of security had strongly recommended the standard array of measures, but he had been turned down by the organising committee. They wanted the event to feel open and free, and were more concerned about damaging that atmosphere than about a possible terrorist attack. And this in a city that saw 29 people killed in a terrorist attack on its Israel Embassy in 1992, and 87 people killed in a second attack on the AMIA Jewish community centre in 1994. Irresponsible? Courageous? Naive? Or a breath of fresh air?

The second encounter occurred when I was in Tallinn, Estonia. There are 3000 Jews living there in total, of whom no more than 2000 are actually involved in the community. I met with several Jewish communal leaders in the city, all of whom had much of interest to say, but the conversation that has stuck with me most took place in the newly-opened kosher restaurant in the newly-built synagogue with two barely 20-something youth movement madrichim. Both are extraordinarily committed; both regularly give up their university vacation time to plan and run activities for young people. Both went to the Jewish day school in the city when they were younger, both grew up thoroughly engaged in Jewish communal activity, and both have participated in various major Jewish initiatives like the Israel Experience and March of the Living. Yet, one had a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, and the other a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. I asked the non-halachic Jew if he was concerned about what might happen if he met a Jewish woman and wanted to marry her according to halacha. He answered that he’d like to marry a Jew, but had never really thought about the potential status problems. Nevertheless, he wasn’t worried about it – he more or less dismissed it out of hand, suggesting that he would do what he wanted, and bring up his family however he wished. His friend – the halachic Jew – was equally dismissive and laughed the whole thing off, playfully teasing him about a potential dilemma that clearly felt both unreal and ridiculous. Naive? Realistic? Foolish? Or a sign of things to come?

The third experience took place while I was in Budapest, Hungary. During my trip, I went to a funky new café in the centre of the city that is listed in the Time Out guide as one of Budapest’s hottest destinations, and met with its owner – or perhaps founder is a better term – a 28 year-old son of a Conservative rabbi. Whilst Time Out explains that this hot destination began its life as a non-profit cultural centre, it fails to mention that it was, and still is, a non-profit Jewish cultural centre. Sirály (pronounced “shirai” and meaning “seagull” in Hungarian, as well as “my song” in Hebrew) is located in a three-storey building, complete with café, library (containing almost exclusively Jewish books), bookshop (again, lots of Jewish books), performance space (mainly Jewish performances), and exhibition space (mainly Jewish art). It doesn’t say that it’s Jewish anywhere, and most of the people I saw sitting in the bar weren’t recognisably Jewish, but it clearly is. Indeed, Adam Schonberger, the founder, produces educational pamphlets about the chagim that are available for anyone to read, has just created an on-line haggadah in Hungarian that he used during the seder he ran in the café, is working on a website for Jewish cultural and intellectual discussion which he publicises openly at the venue, and freely gives out stickers promoting his own Hungarian-language Jewish radio station. No one is a member of Sirály – fundamentally it’s a café that has some nice performances from time-to-time – but it provides a kind of home for unaffiliated Jews in the city, if indeed, as Adam himself asks, affiliation means what we traditionally think it means any more. Provocatively anti-establishment? Pragmatic? Faddish? Or visionary?

What links all of these experiences is that each one of them radically challenges traditional conceptions of community in general, and traditional conceptions of Jewish community in particular. Facebook allows for a version of community to be constructed and created in cyberspace, and builds links between people across cities, countries and continents, irrespective of when they met one another, what they really have in common, or how much they really care about one another. Its Jewish groups have no regard for space or time – they are active everywhere at every hour – and they offer both potentially serious engagement and light-hearted fun. They demand nothing at all: no money, no obligations and no commitments, features which, depending on your standpoint, either characterize them as the greatest threat or greatest boon to Jewish communal life.

YOK opens Jewish community up to the wider world, ignoring the once-impenetrable boundaries that separated Jews from non-Jews, in a way that almost sticks up the proverbial finger to the idea that Judaism can only happen safely and securely behind guarded walls – virtual or real. YOK is open and free, fleeting and sporadic, attracting Jews from the mainstream and the periphery as well as their non-Jewish friends and neighbours. Walls have often played an essential role in Jewish community, serving as divisions between them and us, and hermetic seals around Jewish life, ritual and practice. Removing them, or allowing them to become increasingly porous, may either run the risk of destroying everything, or, alternatively, open up the way to new vistas of unbridled creativity.

The Estonian madrichim demonstrate the remarkably porous boundaries that exist around Jewishness, and cause me, at least, to question whether the halachic definition of who is a Jew can be seriously countenanced in light of some of the stark realities of the contemporary Jewish world. Indeed, I am struck by this issue throughout Eastern Europe. The Shoah decimated Jewish life – Estonia was the first country to be declared officially Judenfrei in the Wannsee protocols of January 1942 – and the post-war experience of Communism provided little, if any, opportunity for the tiny remnant that either remained or migrated there after the war, to rebuild anything of substance. Yet, in 2008, there are community members who are not halachically Jewish, making remarkable – perhaps even miraculous – contributions to Jewish life. Are there any situations where halachic standards can be ignored or overruled? In general, should halachic standards continue to be applied? Or does halacha stand above everything – immune to the trials and tribulations of history – because without clarity of definition, the damage to community could be even greater?

And Sirály is intriguing for several reasons, not least because it conveys an almost nonchalant and certainly carefree conception of belonging, one that neither demands nor requires anything from the individual, yet appears to attract numbers in a manner that puts to shame some of the key initiatives of the organised community. Is Jewish community something unique, heavily grounded in our ideas of what has always been, or should it continually reinvent itself to be in line with contemporary sensibilities, culture and society? If the former, are we willing to give up on those members of the community who count themselves out? And if the latter, is there any kind of unchanging core to Jewish community, without which an initiative is no longer allowed to count itself in?

Perhaps the cynics are right. Perhaps YOK and Sirály are simply flash-in-the-pan endeavours that are unsustainable in the long-term, and of little significance to anyone beyond those who happen to stumble across them – barely even a footnote in Jewish history. But perhaps they, along with my Estonian madrichim, reveal the tip of an iceberg that is destined to sink our longstanding ideas about how Jewish community ought to operate and function, and herald in a new era in which we begin to dramatically redefine what Jewish community means, where, if at all, boundaries are drawn, who is Jewish and who is not, and what one needs to do to belong.


(This article launched the "New Conceptions of Community" initiative at JPR, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, in London)