Philip Berroll

By P.H.I.Berroll

Close to half of all married American Jews have a non-Jewish spouse. Two-thirds do not belong to a synagogue. And a growing number – especially among those aged 30 or younger – identify culturally as Jewish but describe themselves as having no religion.

These are some of the findings of a new survey, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center as part of its Religion & Public Life Project. Since its release to the public, the survey has reignited the decades-long debate in the American Jewish community over assimilation, intermarriage and the difficulties of maintaining a Jewish identity in an open, pluralistic society such as the U.S.

The Pew survey, the most comprehensive opinion poll of American Jews since 2001, was conducted from February through June of this year. In order to obtain a representative sample of poll respondents, the survey covered geographical areas, such as the Northeast, in which 90% of the American Jewish population U.S. resides.

The survey paints what many Jewish leaders are calling a disturbing picture of a people increasingly cut off from their roots and traditions – and not just because of the findings on intermarriage and synagogue membership. Researchers also reported that one-fourth of respondents said they did not believe in God, one-third had a Christmas tree in their home last year… and 34 percent said it was possible to be Jewish while believing that Jesus was the Messiah.

But one finding in particular has raised alarms: 22 percent of American Jews self-identified as having no religion – but among so-called millennials (those born after 1980), the number increased to 32 percent, suggesting a trend that if left unchecked could lead to further attrition in the American Jewish population.

For several of Bergen County’s leading rabbis, the survey has confirmed what they had observed, or suspected, for some time – and should be seen as a wake-up call to the Jewish community.

Rabbi Neil Winkler of Congregation Young Israel of Fort Lee said he was not surprised by the growing number of non-religious Jews.
“Since the collapse of the ghetto walls and the increased mingling of Jews with the ‘outside world,’ the secularization of the Jew has increased as well,” he observed. “For the survival of a people numbering less than .02 percent of world population, this is a major challenge.

“With less and less Jews observing, with more and more Jews intermarrying, it is no wonder that 32 percent of the millennials say they have no religion,” he added. “For most of them, there most probably was very little meaningful religious observance, education or conversation in their home.”

Rabbi Lawrence Zierler of the Jewish Center of Teaneck said the survey illustrated how many Jews had become “consumers” of a cultural experience rather than “joiners” of a religious community.

“When you’re a consumer, you don’t easily wear a label – and if you’re not a joiner, you are not a stakeholder,” he said. “And I think that’s how you get this statistic of people who don’t consider themselves to have any religion, or who belong to a synagogue for vestigial reasons or because of a ‘tribal’ connection rather than a religious connection.”

There were some brighter spots in the survey. Most of the respondents expressed pride at being Jewish and said they had a “strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people,” while 69 percent said they had an emotional attachment to Israel (though only 17 percent agreed that building settlements in the West Bank was helpful to Israel’s security).

And the findings were relatively positive for Orthodox Jews: The survey found that 98 percent of married Orthodox have a Jewish spouse – the overall number for American Jews is 56 percent – and that far fewer young Orthodox than in the past are either leaving for other branches of Judaism or abandoning the faith entirely.

But Rabbi Zierler considers this to be “a semi-consolation” at best, while Rabbi Winkler believes that no one in the Orthodox movement “should smile at any of the [survey] results.

“Losing any Jew is a tragedy, and with numbers indicating that we are disappearing, there is nothing to celebrate,” he said. “It is only natural that those with less intense emotional, educational and social connection to their heritage and their people would find it easier to leave the fold, so I would expect that fewer Orthodox Jews would be doing so. But they are still leaving. And we, too, must wonder why – and what can we do to stem the tide.”

One way to do this, according to Rabbi Zierler, is for Jewish educators to place more emphasis on giving students “an affective experience” that can help them to forge a strong Jewish identity.

“What came out in the [Pew survey] is that there is a lot of teaching to the head, but not to the heart,” he said. “As a result, too many students can’t interpret or reflect upon what they’ve learned. And that doesn’t serve them well when they’re put into a new environment, such as college, where they are really tested and they have no fallback.

“We can’t talk enough to young people, or allow them to ask enough questions,” he added. “Too many teachers edit questions or say, ‘we’ll entertain that, but not now.’ Kids can smell a lie, they can see a fake – and they’ll carry that with them.”

Above all, Rabbi Zierler said, community leaders and educators need to reach out to young people, grooming them for potential leadership roles, at a much earlier age.

“The big mistake of the Jewish community is that we wait until they are settled down to try to turn them into leaders, through young leadership groups or whatever it might be,” he asserted. “We should start, in the upper classes of high school, to have them mentored by people who are good exemplars of community connectedness, before they leave the comfort of the community for the atomized experience of the college campus.

“Right now, no such serious mentoring takes place – and that has created a big disconnect between the generations of the Jewish community.”

Originally published in Jewish Link newspaper, 2013.

By P.H.I.Berroll

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, popularly known as the Claims Conference, is under fire – from some of the very people it was created to serve.

The Conference, which handles restitution claims for Holocaust survivors, is already reeling from a major corruption scandal. It now faces a lawsuit in German courts by a group of survivors from the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and their heirs. At issue: millions of dollars worth of Jewish-owned properties confiscated by the Nazis and since Germany’s reunification, held by the Conference. The organization has given survivors and their heirs a “last-chance” deadline of December 31, 2014 to file claims to the properties in order to receive compensation. The plaintiffs charge that the properties have been undervalued and that the deadline is too arbitrary.

The controversy is rooted in the original 1952 agreement between the newly-formed Claims Conference, Israel and West Germany to make restitution to survivors for their suffering under the Nazis. (In a sad coincidence, the Conference’s founding director Saul Kagan, who helped negotiate the agreement, died earlier this month.) The agreement did not include East Germany, whose Communist leaders argued that as an “anti-fascist” state, they had no connection to the Nazi regime.

But when Germany was reunified in 1990, the Conference and the German government reached a new agreement, under which East German survivors and their heirs became eligible for property compensation. The eligible parties had until the end of 1992 to file claims. The agreement also made the Conference a “Successor Organization,” which gave it title to any unclaimed properties.

Though tens of thousands of property owners and heirs filed claims before the deadline, many others did not. As a result, in 1994, the Conference set up a “Goodwill Fund” of $940 million for claimants who had missed the deadline. The money in the fund came from the proceeds of unclaimed properties that had been sold by the Claims Conference.
Over the next two decades, the Conference repeatedly extended the deadline for applying to the fund. Then, in February of this year, the Conference published, online, a list of still-unclaimed properties which runs to more than 1,400 pages and contains 45,000 names and addresses. The organization also announced that it was creating a new, $67 million fund for claimants, who had until the end of December 2014 to apply for compensation.

But the plaintiffs claim the properties are worth far more than $67 million. They also assert that survivors and heirs, many of whom are old and sick, should have more time to file their claims.

Martin Stern, a British-Jewish businessman now living in Israel, is not taking part in the civil suit, though his grandparents and great-grandparents owned property in Berlin. But Stern, who has long been a vocal critic of the Claims Conference, agrees with the plaintiffs that the Conference has drastically understated the value of the properties.

“Everyone who’s examined this has said that the real value is somewhere between $1.5 billion to $4 billion,” he asserts. “$67 million amounts to three cents on the dollar.”

Unlike the plaintiffs, Stern feels that a year is not too little time for the claimants to file, but rather, too much.

“They are demanding that these people come forward in the next year,” he says. “Many of these people are going to die soon. I think the minute someone comes forward and can prove that this is the house he lived in, and he’s the only one left – pay him on the spot! He’s in his nineties!”
The suit has also provoked often angry charges and rebuttals about the Conference’s treatment of the East German survivors over the past two decades.
Critics accuse the organization of not doing enough over the years to locate claimants. A 2010 report from the British Board of Jewish Deputies, the main representative body of British Jewry, asserted that the Conference had been lax in “publiciz[ing] the information it had and seek[ing] to assist and identify heirs who were rightful claimants.”

But the Conference’s Communications Director, Hillary Kessler-Godin, says that before the original 1992 deadline, the organization “conducted a massive research effort to identify all possible Jewish properties, which otherwise would have been forever lost to the Jewish people… they would have remained with the aryanizers, the owners at the time, or reverted to the German government.” And the organization’s website notes that the Conference launched major advertising campaigns in Jewish newspapers around the world in 1998 and again in 2003 calling for claimants to contact the Goodwill Fund.

The suit represents a new embarrassment for an organization whose once sterling reputation had already been damaged by the corruption scandal. The Conference was defrauded of $57 million in an elaborate scam, perpetrated by several staff members and their cohorts, where a large number of people filed false claims of being Holocaust survivors. To date, 31 defendants have either been convicted or pled guilty; the last of the defendants were sentenced this month.
Critics have charged that the Conference took too long to act after learning of the fraud in 2009, though Kessler-Godin notes that the Federal prosecutor on the case, Preet Bharara, thanked the organization for what he called “their outstanding, ongoing assistance in identifying the participants in this scheme.”
Kessler-Godin also feels it is unfair to lump the scandal together with the lawsuit.

“The two issues are completely unrelated,” she says.

Originally published in Jewish Link newspaper, 2013.

By P.H.I.Berroll

The crisis in Syria has dominated the headlines in recent weeks – and for American Jews, this issue has a particular resonance.

Aside from his use of poison gas, torture and other brutalities against his own people, Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad is also a longstanding enemy of Israel. No one in the Jewish community would be sad to see him go; indeed, many Jewish organizational leaders have publicly supported an attack on Syria. But could such an attack be justified, either on moral or political grounds? And would bombing Syria – even the limited campaign originally threatened by President Obama – lead to an anti-Jewish backlash in this country, similar to what occurred after the Iraq invasion of 2003?

The Jewish Link spoke with several Bergen County rabbis for their views on the situation and related political – and theological – questions.

Rabbi Shmuel Goldin of Congregation Ahavath Torah in Englewood said that he had been “personally in favor” of an attack after studying briefing information from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). “We need to recognize,” he added, “that unless America is willing to back up its words with deeds, we could face potential issues down the road with other countries such as Iran – which could have consequences for Israel, because America is Israel’s most trusted and most powerful ally.”

His sentiments were echoed by Rabbi Benjamin Yudin of Congregation Shomrei Torah in Fair Lawn, who asserted, “When you have such a flagrant violation of human rights, if the world keeps quiet – as we saw, unfortunately, at the time of the Shoah – it only escalates. And therefore, you have a responsibility to take action.”

But Rabbi Lawrence Zierler of the Jewish Center of Teaneck expressed a degree of ambivalence. “There needs to be some kind of response,” he said, “but we have to get past this military mentality that it makes us think we can just go in and extricate [Assad] from power – [there should be] a multifaceted approach. I’m not interested in a military strike unless it’s surgical and you’re taking out a major arms depot. But to go in there and fight a prolonged, protracted war, I don’t support that.”

All of the rabbis acknowledged the possibility of a backlash. “I’ve already heard it,” said Rabbi Goldin. “Someone in my own congregation told me that while shopping, he was accosted by someone saying, ‘You Jews are going to get us back into a war.’” But he and his fellow clergymen felt that this could not be the only consideration when weighing the pros and cons of military action.

“There will always be someone making the equation, ‘This is only being done for Israel’s sake,” said Rabbi Zierler. “But once sarin gas was introduced [by the Assad regime], it became more of a global concern. There’s an expression, I believe in Deuteronomy 19:14, that you’re not supposed to move the boundary that was established by earlier generations. With chemical warfare, you’ve moved an international boundary; it’s a violation of international covenants.”

Still, Rabbi Goldin acknowledged, “There’s a certain degree of hubris on our part if we start saying, ‘Go to war, go to war.’ I think it’s very, very important that the Jewish community recognize that other people’s children are standing on the front lines, and we should be grateful to them. For example, it’s a small thing, but we make it a practice [at Ahavath Torah] every week to read the names of American soldiers who were killed in action, because I think it’s important that we understand the cost.”

The rabbis also said that there was no religious incongruity in calling for an attack – that while the Torah contains many references to peace and exhortations to pursue it, it is hardly a call to pacifism in every situation.
“The Torah speaks of peace as an ideal,” said Rabbi Yudin, “but that same Torah teaches that if somebody is coming to attack you, you have to take the initiative and strike first – and it’s not considered a contradiction.”
Rabbis Zierler and Goldin concurred, while emphasizing the Torah’s strict proscriptions on the subject, as exemplified by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

“War is a recognized reality in the Torah,” said Rabbi Goldin, “but there are rules in the Torah about how to conduct war. That’s why the IDF, when properly perceived, is really the most moral army in the world.”

“My son is in the IDF,” said Rabbi Zierler. “His unit goes house to house to put down insurrections, even though it puts them at greater risk. But in the Jewish view, you fight very carefully – you do not carpet-bomb, you really try to limit the amount of collateral damage. The IDF operates under this heavy moral burden. Otherwise you become an ach zari, an ugly nation.”

Originally published in Jewish Link newspaper, 2013.