Left to right: Netzer emissaries Anna Kislanski, Meirav Kalush and Yossi Cohen.

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YOUTH OUT IN FORCE AT CONNECTIONS 2007

Some 100 teenagers and young adults were among the delegates to Connections 2007, the World Union’s 33^rd international convention in March. They had come to Jerusalem for the international conferences of Netzer Olami and TaMaR Olami (it was TaMaR’s 10^th), and stayed in town to show convention participants some of the faces they’ll be seeing one day in local, national and international Progressive leadership roles.

Many took part in a flag procession during the convention’s opening ceremony, representing countries with World Union constituencies (see WUPJnews #257 for a complete report on the convention). “When Connections officially started,” wrote Gabrielle Berlinski, a youth representative from Aruba, “we proudly carried our country’s flag, knowing that we are the future leaders of our communities.”

The opening also included presentations by some of those taking part in Israel-based programs for Progressive teens and young adults, such as Netzer Olami’s Shnat Netzer gap year, the Eisendrath International Exchange program for North American high school students, the Haifa-based Carmel gap year, and the mechina program for Israeli high school grads that focuses on preparation for military induction, community activism and study.

The Netzer and TaMaR gatherings featured policymaking, networking, education and programming decisions, all of which were important for the delegates to carry out their work when they returned home. Participants also found time to tour Jerusalem and hear lectures on the Israeli Progressive movement and human rights in Israel.

“At the end of each day,” wrote Berlinski, “we would go over what we learned [regarding] issues in our regions and our own communities, and our opinions on certain matters. [A]ll of us had one thing in common – we were ignorant in one way or another [about Judaism], and that worried us. We put together several proposals to be presented to the World Union. As future leaders of our communities,” she added, “we felt an obligation to secure the future of Jews in the post-modern world, but to do this we need the help and support and advice of greater organizations, such as the World Union.”

 
Young adults in the Progressive movement help open the recent World Union convention in Jerusalem.

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GAP YEAR PARTICIPANTS VISIT POLAND

Forty-seven young Progressive Jews taking part in Shnat Netzer, Netzer Olami’s Israel-based gap year program, spent the week before Passover in Poland gaining an overview of the country’s history and the story of its pre-war Jewish community, visiting the sites of wartime ghettos and concentration camps, and being introduced to its growing post-Shoah Jewish community.

Shnat Netzer is for 18- to 20-year-old Progressive Jews from around the world who wish to take a year between high school and college and spend it in Israel learning about the country and its people. Those who traveled to Poland were from Argentina, Australia, England, Germany, South Africa and the U.S., and were participating in Etgar, a four-month segment of Shnat Netzer that emphasizes leadership development (see WUPJnews #244). By far, this was the largest group Shnat Netzer has ever sent to Poland.

The group spent Friday evening with members of Beit Warszawa, Poland’s first post-war Progressive congregation. “The community has around 200 members,” says Etgar coordinator Juliette Solomon. “We met 40 of them for a wonderful Kabbalat Shabbat service followed by dinner. We had a chance to hear about them and to tell them about ourselves. The rabbi (Burt Schuman, originally from the U.S.) seems to have exactly what the community needs - energy and passion.”

Adds Solomon, “I personally think it’s important that every Jew go to Poland. It's such an integral part of who we are, why we are and why we almost weren't. I feel so privileged that I had the opportunity to go with Netzer.”

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GERMAN YOUTH BRING BUTTERFLIES TO FORMER DEATH CAMPS

Fifteen counselors from Jung und Judisch-Junior Netzer, the German Progressive movement’s youth and young adult wing, recently traveled to Berlin and Poland as part of a 10-day Holocaust study seminar with Adi Weichselbaum, youth director of the Union of Progressive Jews of Germany.

“The Holocaust,” says Michal Tal, a Jewish Agency and Netzer Olami emissary to Germany, “is not an easy theme to deal with, especially when you’re trying to build a Jewish identity in Germany.”

The seminar began with five days in Berlin, where participants learned about Jewish life in pre-war Germany. From there they traveled to Poland and over the next five days visited numerous Jewish heritage sites, as well as Treblinka and Majdanek. Deeply moved, and in an effort to express their hope for a better world, they painted butterflies and left them in various locations throughout the camps as part of the Butterfly Project, created by World Union leader Sue Klau to commemorate the 1.5 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust (see WUPJnews #248).

Tal believes the seminar strengthened the participants’ maturity and sense of Jewish identity. “There were many tears and questions, but always the hope for a better world. They went back to their families with a stronger will to affect people. They are [now] more motivated to make a change - young Jews who live in Germany in 2007 choose to remember, not to hate.”

 
Members of Jung und Judisch, the German youth group, expressed their hope for the future with decorative butterflies in honor of the children who died during the Holocaust.

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KEEPING YOUTH IN THE ISRAELI MOVEMENT THROUGH SOCIAL ACTION

Throughout the year, members of Noar Telem, the Israeli sniff of Netzer Olami, participate in efforts by the B’kavod Fund to assist disadvantaged populations in Israel. Prior to the recent Passover and Easter holidays they helped pack food parcels for families in need (see WUPJnews #262). Currently, they are conducting a clothing drive to benefit students at the Kfar Silver boarding school, where the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism holds its summer camp. Many of the Kfar Silver students come from broken families or are economically disadvantaged.

After Noar Telem, many Israeli teens continue their involvement with Progressive Judaism through the IMPJ’s mechina, a gap-year leadership program that prepares Israeli youth for the rigors of military life by teaching them leadership skills and instilling in them a heightened sense of individual and collective responsibility. Participants live, work and study in a mixed Jewish-Arab section of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, where they also help lead programs for the disadvantaged. Recently they met with Rifat “Jimmy” Turk, the first Arab to have made it big in Israeli football, who is today a community activist for youth at risk and an active proponent of coexistence and dialogue.

During the current onslaught of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, mechina youth have been partnering with B’kavod to help provide shelter and relief for residents of the border town of Sderot at the movement’s new Mishkenot Ruth Daniel in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. (WUPJnews will cover this story next week.)

Once they reach young adulthood, Progressive Jews in Israel are invited to join the IMPJ’s Young Adults Leadership Forum (YALF), which has numerous social aspects but also focuses on education and tikkun olam. In March, the YALF marked International Women’s Month by sponsoring a series of lectures and study sessions on the status of women in Judaism that took place at Tel Aviv’s Congregation Beit Daniel.

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AUSTRALIAN NETZER GRADS SEEK TO INCREASE THEIR NUMBERS

Twenty-two bogrim (graduates) of Netzer Olami from the Union for Progressive Judaism in Australia, New Zealand and Asia recently attended a four-day seminar aimed at strengthening regional programs for Progressive young adults and increasing their involvement in Progressive Judaism. Held in Mansfield, in the high country of southern Australia, the seminar focused on ideological and logistical issues regarding community, prayer, political activism and Israel, as well as resource allocations, the role of shlichim (emissaries) and ways to keep Netzer bogrim active.

The seminar participants - from Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney – believe that it is most important to build a future membership base by encouraging wider participation in Netzer Olami's Shnat Netzer program in Israel, which imbues recent high school graduates with a sense of continuity and involvement for the years to come (see item above).

“Our task now,” say regional education head Sarah Gelbart, Romi Goldschlager of Melbourne and Chantal Tanner of Sydney, “is to go out to the community – [to] build connections and increase our numbers to regular events, camps and, of course, Shnat [Netzer]. We will strive to be more socially and politically aware and active.”

Bogrim from the Union for Progressive Judaism in Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

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BUSY CALENDAR FOR YOUNG BRITISH REFORM JEWS

A recent report from RSY-Netzer, the youth wing of Britain’s Reform movement, says it’s “entering its busiest part of the year - in fact the busiest summer for seven years.” There are plans for its annual Shemesh (Sun) summer camp (actually four separate camps, each with 100 to 150 campers); four summer tours to Israel with a total of 135 participants; and 14 new “shnatties” (as participants in the Shnat Netzer program call themselves), who will be heading to Israel in late summer to participate in the Netzer gap year program. And after the Shemesh camps, a group of 17-year-olds will head out on a two-week trip to Prague, Budapest and Berlin with Netzer counterparts from Britain’s Liberal movement. With a schedule like this, there’s no time for Britain’s Reform Jewish youth to be bored.

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BIG PLANS FOR LATIN AMERICA

Latin America sent the largest delegation to the recent TaMaR Olami (young adults) conference in Jerusalem, with participants from Argentina, Aruba, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama, all of whom stayed on for the World Union convention. This followed on the heels of TaMaR’s successful conferences last year in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay.

The plan is to maintain this momentum with additional conferences, seminars and retreats, and to expose more Central and South American Progressive youths and young adults to movement programs such as Shnat Netzer and leadership training offered by the World Union and TaMaR Olami.

Spearheading such efforts is Tamara Schagas, the Argentine-born Netzer-TaMaR staffer based in Jerusalem and former member of the World Union executive board. “We started almost a year ago with the TaMaR Latin American Seminar in Porto Alegre, Brazil,” she says. “In November 2006 we gathered again in Punta del Este. Last January I had the opportunity to [co-lead] the youth track of the UJCL’s (Union of Jewish Congregations in Latin America) conference in Costa Rica. One of the most powerful requests these youngsters had was to ‘be connected.’”

They will have that chance to connect again next weekend – June 1 to 3 – as 50 young adults from Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Jamaica, Mexico and Panama gather in Panama for TaMaR’s first regional conference for Central America and the Caribbean. UJCL president, Hilda Ten Brink said "I think this encounter is extremely important for the future leaders of our congregations,” and expressed appreciation to the regional rabbis andleaders, as well as the World Union leadership, for continuing to place priority on youth activities and development.

Also on TaMaR’s Latin American calendar are a July 2007 leadership seminar under the auspices of the World Union's Anita Saltz International Education Center, a youth camp in El Salvador during the first week of January 2008, as well as participation in the regional (UJCL) conference in Jamaica later that month.

 
Alua Ainhorn, social action chair with TaMaR in Brazil, addressed the audience at Connections 2007 in Jerusalem.

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HUC-JIR HOLDS CONFERENCE FOR NETZER COORDINATORS IN FSU

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion recently held a three-day strategic planning retreat in Kiev for coordinators from Netzer Olami in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. It was initiated by the FSU Netzer director, Zanna Zlotnik, led by Dr. Lisa Grant, an education specialist on HUC-JIR's faculty in New York City, and made possible with generous support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. The meetings included creative programming, situation analysis and strategic planning with a focus on developing a vision and mission statement for informal education for the youth movement in the FSU.

“We were able to make great progress in developing a sense of vision and specific direction to guide the Netzer coordinators in their work over the next few years,” said Grant. “We came to agreement that Torah in its many manifestations and interpretations (study, worship, celebration, transmission) is at the heart of Jewish community. Creating consensus about this idea laid an essential foundation as we began the work of crafting a vision for Netzer.”

The coordinators developed practical strategies to promote that vision, to achieve the stated objectives, and to address the key themes that emerged from the situation analysis.

Rabbi Alexander Dukhovny, the World Union’s Kiev-based rabbi and incoming chairman of the Rabbinic Council of the Former Soviet Union, served as host of the retreat and led a study session and tour of the city. Over Shabbat, participants attended services with his congregation, Hatikva.

“The team worked very hard together and accomplished a great deal,” says Grant. “We began as a group of individuals, but by the end of the process, there was a much stronger esprit de corps formed around shared values and commitments, and a deep sense of accomplishment. It was a great honor and pleasure to be able to have helped them reach this important milestone in their own professional development and in the life of Netzer in the FSU.”

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UPCOMING EVENTS

June 28 – July 1, 2007 – Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism’s Golfing FORE! Reform

July 12-15, 2007 – Annual Conference - Union of Progressive Jews in Germany, Berlin/Spandau. For information, write to michelsohn@liberale-juden.de

August 29 – September 9, 2007 – World Union's Mission To Russia

October 18-22, 2007 – Annual Conference of the Union for Progressive Judaism (UPJ), Hobart, Tasmania

December 12-16, 2007 – URJ Biennial - Union for Reform Judaism, San Diego, California

February 27 – March 20, 2008 – “Shalom India: Seeing India through Jewish Eyes” tour, led by Rabbi Fred Morgan of Melbourne, Australia

March 13-16, 2008 – Biennial Conference of the World Union’s European Region, Vienna, Austria

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