Europe's spiritual Holocaust
So are a stunning 85% of newly married European Jews according to the Rabbinical Center of Europe.
According to RCE's research, over 85% of European Jews assimilate and intermarry with non-Jews; 80% do not attend synagogues, even on the central holiday of Yom Kippur; over 75% of Jewish children in Europe do not receive a Jewish education, and over 90% of European Jewish students have no connections with the Jewish community.
The sobering figures led Rabbi Shimon Elitov, a member of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate Council, to say "assimilation in the shocking numbers that we see is worse that the physical Holocaust that we saw."
In order to provide European rabbis with tools to respond to the threat, Rabbis Moshe Braverman and Doron Kornbluth ran a workshop at the conference to give pointers on how to deal with the phenomenon.It sounds like the situation is well-past workshops. Massive action is needed - and even that may not help.
Deputy Religious Services Minister Eli Ben-Dahan presented a different counter-measure to the difficulties of Jewish life in Europe, calling on European Jews to leave and immigrate to Israel or face disappearing. In contrast to the 85% assimilation rate, Ben-Dahan argued that in Israel the rate is a mere thousandth.Perhaps it's a Heavenly decree that so many French Jews are fleeing to Israel. And given that the cause of that flight is Muslim anti-Semitism -a phenomenon that is rising in many other European countries, perhaps ultimately European Jewry will either flee to Israel or be lost.
Labels: aliya, European Jews, French anti-Semitism, intermarriage
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:45 PM
2 Comments:
I find the 90% number to be suspect. I know Jews in Europe and my experience is not a 90% intermarriage. I bet that if you count half or 1/4 Jews as Jews, then you may get the 90% number. But yes, there is a problem. However, I would also expect the numbers of non-Jewish Christians who attend church in Europe to be even smaller in number.
Just to point out, Jews who arrive in the big waves of Aliyah look exactly like the people in the countries they come from. So intermarriage is not a new phenomenon. I think the proprietary adjudications, retractions, dissing, etc. of a Jewish country's Govt Sector Rabbis is what is new and may actually accomplish a huge reduction in identified Jews in the world. There are common ground areas where we all could be learning together and where, I don't know how, but somehow separate from electoral politics and individual importance seeking, a drawing in and certifying of all kinds of Jews, including the Ruth wing, which was not slimed in the Torah, and as a matter of fact, was the provenance of our fabulous King David. Spurning the incoming, just like socialism/marxism, is not what the Torah says.
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