The Future of Jewish Life is Discussed at the Jwb Convention

“The kind of future of the Jewish family we have will determine whether our grandchildren will be Jewish,” Rabbi Reuven Kimelman, a Brandeis University professor, told North American and world Jewish communal leaders at the opening plenary of the 1986 JWB Biennial Thursday at the Sheraton Convention Centre here.

Almost 1,000 Jewish communal leaders from throughout the United States and Canada and representatives from Israel, Europe and South America are attending the five-day convention.

“As the family goes, so goes Judaism,” Kimelman told the delegates. “There is no Jewish institution more brittle than the family. The family is the barometer of private Jewish health. But there can be no private health without public health.

“The implicit message of modernity was that Judaism should become a private thing. In public, Jews were expected to emulate the dominant culture. The result was that Jews imposed upon themselves a dichotomy between the private and public sectors.”

As Jews went more public “they became visibly less Jewish”, Kimelman said. “Since social and economic achievement was gained in the public arena, success was correlated with a lack of visible Jewishness. As we played out more and more of our lives in the public arena we became less and less able to transmit our Jewishness to the next generation.”

The result, he said, “was that as a Jewish community became socially and economically integrated it disintegrated Jewishly.” Kimelman warned, “If this process were to continue here our coffins would be sealed by the time all of America’s Jews have four American-born grandparents.”

The Holocaust and the State of Israel have “created a post-modern Judaism,” he said. “The Holocaust taught Jews that their visibility does not increase their vulnerability. On the contrary, the lack of Jewish visibility in positions of power, in a pluralistic culture, is what renders them vulnerable.”