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Photo:Israel Bardugo
Rabbi Lau: Jewish communities must be strenghtened
Photo:Israel Bardugo

Jewish learning returns to Europe

European Jewish Study Network brings Judaism closer to Europe’s Jewish communities via video conference lessons, lectures, even live Webcasts

ITALY - Communities across Europe were dwindling away. Jewish studies were hardly foremost on European Jews’ minds. Jewish community affairs were almost nonexistent. Two years ago, however, European rabbis decided to fight back against growing assimilation and alienation in European Jewish communities by establishing the European Jewish Study Network in Brussels.

 

The goal of this unique initiative was to bring European Jews back in touch with the Jewish tradition in ways that are enticing, interesting and, in keeping with modern times, also fully digitized.

 

Chairman of the EJSN, Rabbi Sholom Liberow, stated that “we started off by holding video-conference lessons for smaller Jewish communities that cannot draw more prominent speakers and lecturers. In this way, the lecturer and the students could at the very least interact via cyberspace .We also brought renowned speakers such as Professor Yisrael Aumann, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, opposition leader MK Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud), and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, to larger communities across Europe, even taking some of these speakers on a lecture series tour across Europe.

 

“There are two million Jews in Europe, and we want to bring them closer to the Jewish faith through such Jewish studies,” said Liberow.

 

The European Jewish Study Network already boasts a membership of some 40 communities across Europe, including Belgium, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Vienna, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Helsinki, The Hague, Paris, Geneva and Basel. Each community has it own community directorate that acts as a liaison with the organization’s headquarters in Brussels, and more communities are joining EJSN every day.

 
צילום: ישראל ברדוגו

At the conference (Photos: Yisrael Bardugo)

 

Two weeks ago, the organization decided to take yet another step forward by holding a major pan-European Jewish seminar in Stresa, Italy, featuring 150 representatives from various communities across Europe. Participants were treated to scintillating lectures by speakers Rabbi Lau, Rabbi Yitzchak Shochat, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Gerlick , Professor Yehoshua Lieberman, and Rabbi Yosef Gladman, as well as the finest in Jewish music by maestro Avraham Fried.

 

According to Rabbi Liberow, this is merely the beginning, and additional seminars are also in the works for various European communities. The EJSN also plan to establish a publishing department to distribute its various study material in all European languages, as well as to increase the number of internet lectures it currently features.

  

'We are captains manning a drowning vessel'

Rabbi Lau stated at the Stresa conference that “the EJSN must be aided and supported in its efforts to bring our lost brethren back from the darkness.”

 

The Rabbi further stated that “today we are akin to captains standing at the helm of a sinking ship, which we must not abandon as long as any on board are alive. Assimilation and intermarriage are threatening to destroy Jewish communities all across the former Soviet Union as well as Western Europe.”

 
צילום: ישראל ברדוגו

Rabbi Lau with the German delegation

 

“As long as there is still a Jewish presence in Europe, stated Rabbi Lau, “we must do all we can to strengthen Jewish communities and Jewish education across Europe and stress to these communities the vital importance of Torah and Jewish heritage, which are the raison d’être of the Jewish people. Surely the future lies in Israel, and we forever pray to ‘be next year in Jerusalem’, but until then we must bring Europe’s Jews back to the synagogues. If there are no synagogues and community centers, there won’t be anyone left to return to Jerusalem.”

 

‘I woke up when I realized my son couldn’t read Hebrew’

How did various European Jewish community members feel regarding the EJSN’s Stresa conference? Roman Habermann, Munich Jewish Community president, stated that the conference helped him forge new business connections as well as helping him rekindle his commitment to the Jewish faith. “I met several prominent Jewish business executives from the United Kingdom as well as the Netherlands, and feel that the EJSN has a stellar future in store.”

 

Shlomo Zimmerman, a business executive, stated that “this organization really inspired us. It’s nice to forge ties with a greater European community, and I really want to be part of this tremendous undertaking.”

 

Negba Wickers-Nager arrived at the EJSN conference from the Hague in the Netherlands. She summed up the EJSN’s essential function at a very personal, intimate level: “We have four children and live in a city with a very small Jewish community that does not really have a Jewish school; barely a kindergarten. I realized recently, with considerable shock and dismay, that my child cannot read Hebrew and that woke me up.

 

"This conference drove me to enroll my children at a Jewish school, perhaps in a neighboring community. It made me realize that there are so many Jewish communities across Europe."

 


פרסום ראשון: 03.23.08, 19:52
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