As Jewish high school seniors cram for their baccalaureate exams, the Jewish community in Paris is engaged in soul-searching over the role of Jewish education in French society.
Signaling the mounting concern was the publication last month in the Jewish weekly, Actualite Juive, of a supplement assessing the state of religious instruction in French Jewish schools. The schools provide both secular and Jewish education.
Surveying numerous school directors, rabbis, teachers and former students throughout France, the paper reports some positive developments — for instance, that religion teachers, traditionally the lowest paid faculty members, finally have begun to see a rise in salaries.
On the whole, however, the paper presents religious teaching as a communal tradition in danger of becoming irrelevant for a younger generation intent on achieving success in French society.
Religious instruction “is looked upon as the neglected child since there is no grading system sanctioning the level of knowledge, a problem always debated in Jewish schools,” explains Adam Ouknine, the Director of the Lycee Yeshiva Etz-Haim in St. Maur, a Parisian suburb.
Students in Jewish schools post above-average results on the national exams needed for admission to French universities, but school directors complain that the students sometimes lack motivation in their religious studies.
One contributor to Actualite Juive concludes that the biggest challenge to teaching Jewish observance today is “to convey a system of values which in most cases has no relationship with the everyday life of students at home.”
If such sentiments are disturbing to the more conservative members of the community, they are the material upon which Rabbi Vicky Bellahsen staked his candidacy for chief rabbi of Paris, though he ultimately lost to the incumbent, David Messas.
Bellahsen, a former director of educational services for the Consistoire de Paris — the assembly of rabbis and laymen that governs Jewish affairs in the city — criticized the Parisian Jewish educational system for a “lack of dynamism” that fails to meet parents’ expectations.
What’s needed, Bellahsen says, is a renewed effort to relate religious instruction to the reality of mainstream French life.
“We have to show that Judaism has a message to send out to modern civilization,” Bellahsen advises. “There is a necessity to open up to the surrounding cultural environment and to adapt the message of the synagogue to it. We have to interest youth, get the elites back and prevent the ghettoization of the community.”
This call for a more adaptive Judaism reflects a general recognition that market concerns have penetrated the Jewish educational system. Schools apparently have gotten the message both that they must adapt themselves to compete successfully with secular schools, and to prepare their students for the professional challenges they will face in the New Economy.
Judging from the advertisements that fill the Jewish press, many Jewish schools already are in the process of adapting. The quantity of school recruitment ads reveals that competition for incoming students is stiff, especially in the Paris region, a situation that has demanded innovation.
To attract potential students, many schools now tout their multimedia resources and their ability to train students for the “high-tech world.”
In the midst of their reflection on the role of Jewish education and the place of Judaism in modern French society, French Jews recently received an ugly reminder of why Jewish schools remain necessary in the 21st century.
At the College Landowski, a public junior high in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, teen-agers studying English grammar were given practice sheets with sentences expressing an anti-Israeli perspective.
The phrases, which the students were to rewrite in the passive voice, were: “The Palestinian Imad family has buried Wael;” “Israeli soldiers shot him in the head;” “His friends took him to the hospital immediately;” “Teenagers’ deaths keep Doctor Abdel Mari busy every night”; and “Israeli soldiers will kill again Palestinian children.”
Distressed students brought the matter to their parents’ attention; it has now been taken up by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism. Michel Zaoui, the head of the league’s legal division, has reported the situation to the Academy of Versailles — the administrative body that governs the local schools — which has assigned an inspector to investigate the case.
In a meeting with five mothers, however, the school principal refused to comment on the actions of the English professor, telling the women they were overreacting.
Such incidents may help convince French Jews of the need to retain control over their children’s education.
Most likely, it is the more liberal elements of the community — whose children attend public schools, and who view religious instruction mainly as a complement to their children’s secular education — who will be most deeply affected by any anti-Israel rhetoric in the schools.
Controversy in Britain over charity
funded by royalties from ‘Mein Kampf’ LONDON, June 24 (JTA) –A controversy has erupted after reports that a British charity set up to aid German Jewish refugees accepted royalties from the sale of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” — even though the group no longer accepts the royalties.
The public announcement that the German Welfare Council no longer accepts the funds followed a report last week in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper claiming the charity had received more than $675,000 from Hitler’s work.
The council disputed the Telegraph’s numbers, saying it had received an average of $5,400 a year from the royalties for the last quarter-century.
The charity said it used some of the funds to meet shortfalls in its budget, and invested the rest. It decided to stop taking the money last year due to the decreasing number of Jewish refugees requiring the charity’s service, it said.
The remainder of the “Mein Kampf” money — which the council estimates to be $50,000 — has been kept separate from other council funds, pending a decision about what to do with the money.
Lord Janner, chairman of the British-based Holocaust Educational Trust, condemned any charity’s decision to accept funds from Hitler’s opus.
“I would be surprised if any charity would knowingly wish to benefit from Hitler’s royalties,” he told JTA, describing “Mein Kampf” as an “evil work” and “political pornography of the worst kind.”
A combination autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf” was banned in Britain from 1944 until 1969. But it has been available in English for more than 30 years, despite protests from Jews and the West German government.
When royalties from the sales of the book began arriving at the offices of the literary agency Curtis Brown, the agency asked the West German Embassy in London what to do with the money.
The government of the German state of Bavaria owns the foreign publishing rights to the tract, but the embassy told Curtis Brown that the German Welfare Council would be an appropriate recipient of the funds.
The council was founded in 1952 to aid German Jewish refugees in Britain, and is largely funded by the German Foreign Office.
“The council opposes the commercial publication of ‘Mein Kampf.’ However, as the publishing house did not refrain from commercial publishing in the U.K., the view was taken that the royalties should at least benefit the victims of Nazi persecution,” the council said in a statement.
The charity decided at the end of last year to stop accepting the royalties because “over the past years the advice and support work devoted to victims of Nazi persecution has steadily declined and now amounts to about 10 percent” of the charity’s total caseload, the council said.
No figures were available on the number of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Britain. The council now focuses most of its efforts on helping non-Jewish Germans who live in Britain.
Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf” in prison in 1924 after his failed Beer Hall putsch, and it was first published in 1925.
When he became chancellor of Germany in 1933, the book became a required school text. It sold in the millions, and for many years was Hitler’s main source of income.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
