The “role that Jewish education must play if we are to realize the future creative potential of the Jewish people” was stressed by Morton Mandel, chairman of the World Leadership Conference for Jewish Education which opened here last night.
“The time has come to add a commitment to Jewish education to the economic commitment, social commitment and political commitment we have already made to the survival of Israel and the Jewish people,” Mandel told some 260 invitees to the opening plenary of the Conference at the Jerusalem Hilton Hotel.
The three day conference has brought together some 180 Jewish community leaders and Jewish educators from more than 60 countries around the world and 80 of their counterparts from Israel. The conference is expected to concentrate on the survival of Jewry in a secular age when assimilation and intermarriage are rampant.
“There is no more appropriate place in the world for serious Jewish leaders and educators to reflect on the future of the Jewish people than in the spiritual center of our people — Jerusalem,” Mandel asserted. “The challenge we face is an impressive one. We meet at a time when even the best of statistics indicate an erosion of identification and an increasing number of Jews not receiving any form of Jewish education.”
LEADERSHIP SKILLS NEEDED
Mandel, a Cleveland businessman and philanthropist, said he viewed the make-up of Jewish community leaders as a most important step because “most of us are builders… in commerce and industry and in other professions. We have brought the leadership skills, honed in the workplace, to the service of the Jewish community.”
In that, he said, those attending the conference have helped to build Jewish communities in the many lands from which they had come and had also been helpful in building bridges to Israel.
The Conference chairman underscored the addition of a commitment to Jewish education to the economic, social and political commitments already manifest by noting that “Jewish communities throughout the world committed to these values and principles, are the best assurance that Israel will survive. The future of Israel is linked to the quality of Jewish life everywhere,” Mandel declared.
“We, each of us, “Mandel said, “come to this meeting with a different set of life experiences, experiences shaped in a world different than the one in which we live and even more distant from the one in which our grandchildren will live.”
APPRECIATING JEWISH VALUES
He explained that in his own family upbringing, he had been imbued with a commitment to service and caring but “the afternoon Heder to which I went out of a sense of duty to my parents” he had left with a feeling of liberation.
“Jewish education was not central to my Jewish experience,” he said, adding that he knows now he did not appreciate the options available to Jewish families and young people in a free society, which permit one to be Jewish or to walk away from Jewish life.
Continuing, Mandel added: “I am convinced that our families and young people need an appreciation of Jewish values, need an intellectual understanding of our heritage and need personal identification and experience of the meaning of Jewish life. Without these, we cannot meaningfully compete in a free and open society.”
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