Behind the Headlines Dealing with Alienation

The major paradox that now exists in Israel is that the country “has a population of Israelis more than it has a population of Jews.” Israeli Jews, especially the youth, have no Jewish identity, and “little feeling for the country. There’s very little they believe in — there’s a vacuum inside them.”

These are the sentiments expressed by Hillel Wiener, the executive vice president of the Gesher Educational Affiliates, a non-political, independent organization based in Israel which is now tackling this problem. Although the group is little-known in the United States, Wiener, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said that Gesher is, in Israel, the “largest Jewish education system outside of the Israeli government.” Its purpose, he said, is “to bridge the gap that exists between the religious and secularist groups in Israel.”

Along with that concept, “what we’ve tried to do is to set up what we call ‘Jewish Identity Programs’ … which involves trying to transmit to youngsters, in the most creative, intellectual, national framework the basic concepts of Judaism, and to expose the youngsters to these ideas in such a way that it will be most palatable to them.

Gesher is not involved in proselytizing, nor is it concerned with building things material, such as rebuilding deprived neighborhoods in Israel as Operation Renewal does. Gesher is trying to guide the ideas of Israeli youth, so that the non-religious sector may, if not follow Jewish Law, at least appreciate its culture and heritage, and so that the religious sector understands why the secularists are the way they are and, says Wiener, learns “not to denigrate and talk down” to the non-religious.

Dr. Daniel Tropper, a native New Yorker, founded Gesher in 1969, when he went on aliya after, according to Wiener, becoming “disturbed at the disparate elements and the antagonism that existed in Israel.” Tropper began to run informal educational seminar programs where Israeli religious and non-religious could ask questions and exchange ideas, with, in Tropper’s words, “no holds barred.” By using these methods, said Wiener, “he was able to get the youngsters to almost enjoy talking to one another,” and to learn things previously “so misunderstood by them.”

DEVELOPED INCREASED CONFIDENCE

Over the years, the organization developed because of the increased confidence it received from both the Israeli people and the Israeli government “to the point,” said Wiener, “where we were able to get direct subsidies from the government, in terms of running seminars.” Eventually, Gesher began to run seminars for the government — they were able to take youngsters out of school a certain number of hours a week, and work with them.

In 1976, when the organization become big enough, it purchased a campus in Safed where it expanded its seminar programs from running seminar programs for 1000 or 2000 youngsters a year to where they could run them for between 3000 to 5000 a year. The facilities in Safed also gave them the opportunity to run follow up programs, including Shabbatonim (weekend seminars), coffee houses, study circles, mini-seminars within the school system, and even those specifically run to include the entire family, not just the teenage son or daughter.

“About three years ago, “Wiener said, “we started to produce curricula for the school system itself, where; under contract by the government, we wrote a series for the high school, which was entitled ‘Have’ Neayain,’ really meaning ‘Come Let Us Explore’ ” In this program, during school hours, “youngsters were exposed, in official curricular form to the very basic elements of specific holidays, so that they would receive a much deeper understanding of what the historical and religious aspects of the holidays were.”

This series now distributed to approximately 55,000 students during each Jewish holiday and is so successful that Gesher now runs a junior high school series now being studied by over 40 percent of Israeli seventh graders.

The program is also unique in that before it goes about teaching the students it runs seminars for the primarily non-religious teachers. What is done, said Wiener, is “to get their (the teachers’) input, prepare the materials so we know what is most palatable for them to teach, for the youngsters to learn, what is most acceptable in terms of approach, and then to run seminars to train them in the use of the materials.”

FOUR ‘ORGANIZATIONAL ARMS’

At present, Gesher has four “organizational arms”: Mossad Gesher, which runs the student seminars; the David Schoen Institute for Creative Jewish Education, which trains the teachers and produces curricula for the junior high and high school; Jerusalem Productions, which is working to produce a Sesame Street-type television series embodying Gesher’s approach to creative Jewish education in a further attempt to reach the entire family; and, finally, the Machonim, or Institutes for Zionist and Jewish Education, formerly a separate organization founded in the early 1970s by Mordecai Bar-On, but which merged with what was then called the Gesher Foundation to become the Gesher Educational Affiliates.

The biggest arm of Gesher, the Machonim, which previously ran programs for over 40,000 youngsters, now enables Gesher to reach almost 50,000 students. “And our projection is that this year,” said Wiener, Gesher “will be running seminar programs in basic concepts of Judaism, Jewish identity, values and heritage for 85 percent of the 11th graders in Israel, and some 30 percent of the 12th graders.”

In addition to regular programs, Gesher now runs experimental programs, which include rehabilitating Israeli criminals, as well as working with the Israeli Sephardic population, trying to give it, in Wiener’s words, “a sense of its own worth,” rather than trying to impose upon it the Ashkenazic customs and laws “which the government has all too often been doing.”

Gesher has also been working with Soviet Jewish emigrees in transit in Rome, Wiener said. The Gesher representatives in Rome do not try to impress the emigrees to go on aliya, but merely try to impart to them a “positive feeling towards their own heritage, towards their own Jewishness,” so that they will not lose themselves to assimilation, Wiener said. Asked why Gesher has offices only in New York and in Toronto, outside of Israel. Wiener replied: “We have a captive audience in Israel; we have support from the Israeli government; and not only that, we have our homeland which should stand as an example to everyone else….Let’s start at home.”