Professional Leadership Responds to Crises

in Israel and Jewish Communities Worldwide

A CHANGING EUROPEAN JEWRY

Antony Lerman

Chief Executive, Hanadiv Charitable Foundation

Plenary presentation at the

WORLD CONFERENCE OF JEWISH COMMUNAL SERVICE

Friday 14 November 2003, Jerusalem Renaissance Hotel

When I was at university, I was particularly affected by an enigmatic little book called The Sense of an Ending by the literary critic Frank Kermode. This was a tantalising little volume, full of fascinating thoughts, interpretations and insights about how creative writers seek to impose a pattern on history by imagining crisis and apocalypse.

I thought of this book when I started to prepare these remarks, first because of the title of the conference and second because when you read much of what is being written about Jewish life in Europe by many people in the United States and in Israel—and even to a degree in Europe itself—the phrase ‘sense of an ending' springs to mind. So much of this comment paints a picture so bleak that you might marvel at how any Jew can continue even to breathe in such a poisoned and stagnant atmosphere.

That atmosphere, which is said to pervade the whole of Europe and characterise Jewish life in Europe today is an unrelieved antisemitism. In fact most people seem to talk of this as being a ‘new antisemitism'—unfair and vitriolic criticism of Israel which casts Israel as the pariah among nations. This discourse began to appear in earnest after the outbreak of the second intifada and then gained momentum after Durban, September 11th etc. And the discourse keeps on coming. A friend recently emailed me the article, ‘Graffiti on history's walls', by Mortimer B. Zuckerman in US News and World Report in which he paints a picture of antisemitic violence and rhetoric rampaging across Europe. Then there was the piece a couple of weeks ago by Mark Strauss in Foreign Policy called ‘Antiglobalism's Jewish Problem' which focuses mostly on Europe.

And a key argument of much of this comment is that carrying on Jewish life in Europe—which for many is already in terminal decline—has become practically impossible. In Ha'aretz last year, Judith Tydor-Baumel wrote that ‘A great wave of antisemitism has washed over Europe, reinstating the taboo on anything that smacks of Judaism'. This double-whammy argument was epitomised in an article last year by the Israeli journalist Ari Shavit who lambasted Europe for devouring its Jews and refusing to acknowledge its responsibility and allowing the same forces to rise up again. ‘[Europe] is experiencing a spastic attack of antisemitism . . . not . . . seen since the second world war . . . and this time it is flickering not only in the eyes of the mob and in the skinheads on the right—this time it is flashing in the eyes of intellectuals, and journalists and television personalities.' The consequence of this?: dwindling Jewish populations, ‘the few Jewish newspapers that still survive are being read like lengthy obituary columns', Jewish schools closing down, practically everywhere ‘the last Jews', ‘The end of the road'.

And lest you think I locate all such bleak commentary as coming from outside of Europe, let me quote from an advert placed in the International Herald Tribune by the European Jewish Congress in the wake of the antisemitic comments of the Malaysian prime minister. It read in part: ‘How can one be astonished at the increase in violent antisemitic acts in Europe when outrageous verbal attacks targeted at Jews have been greeted for years with only silence as a rebuke [my emphasis]?' If this is what the pan-European body which is supposed to defend Jews in Europe feels about the climate—‘only silence as a rebuke'—what hope is there?

This image of Europe as riddled with antisemitism often goes hand in hand with a fundamental inability, on the part of many Americans and Israelis, to understand what Jews are doing in Europe today at all. Jews fled Europe's antisemitism in the early part of the 20th century: what on earth are they still doing there after what that led to? Zionism provided them with one answer. America provided them with another.

So, Europe is plagued by an antisemitism which its political leaders refuse to condemn and which will hasten the end of Jewish life on the continent which anyway is in terminal decline.

The issue of antisemitism in Europe is a serious one and needs to be addressed, and I'm going to come back to it at the end of my remarks. And I'm going to do this because, like a friend of mine, the historian Michael Brenner, head of the Jewish studies department at the University of Munich, I realise that we in Europe ‘tend to let outsiders set our agenda'. As a result, there's a danger of focusing Jewish debate on ‘the threats to the Jewish world, rather than the Jewish world'.

The fact is that there are indeed problems facing European Jews. But to judge that these problems are entirely about threats; that their sum total is antisemitism and Jewish decline, is a complete distortion of reality. To frame Jewish life in Europe in this way is fundamentally flawed.

The true picture is a complex one, not easily summed up in a couple of sound bites. There are, after all, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Jews in more than 40 states; the 1.5 represents the core Jewish population, according to the American Jewish Year Book ; the 2.5 is the ‘enlarged' population according to estimates collated by Professor Sergio DellaPergola. In fact there are some who would put the enlarged population even higher. Looked at in the round, this population is incredibly diverse. Each community is shaped by its specific historical experiences, the mores and ethnic composition of that nation state, where its members came from. There's the saying: ‘Jews are just like everyone else—only more so.' And European Jews are diverse in their multiple forms of Jewish identification. You could say that in the last 15 years we have been moving quite rapidly towards a European Jewry which is a ‘community of communities'—not in the national sense, but in the sense of being a diverse, pluralistic collection of communities based on religious practice, degree of ethnic identification, gender, cultural interests, social concern, political orientation and so on.

This diversity—a process already underway before the collapse of communism—accelerated after 1989 as Europe and its Jews underwent a process of change that was both rapid and profound. For the first time ever, as the intellectual historian Diana Pinto pointed out in the mid-1990s, with the communities of Central and Eastern Europe gaining their freedom, Jews became voluntary Jews. This created a new dynamic across the whole of Europe. Outside organizations came in with different motives, a new wave of Jewish migration began, but many came out of the woodwork and stayed. So the dominant questions facing Jews were not how to close up the shop, how to manage reaching ‘the end of the road'. The questions were: How do we recover our pre-Holocaust, pre-Communist Jewish pasts? How do we set up kindergartens and schools? How do we build welfare structures that provide Jewish content and not just soup? What to do about poverty and elderly Holocaust survivors? How do we recover Jewish property? The questions were about how to live, not just how to manage death. How to bring to life Jewish culture? How to preserve Jewish heritage and make it work for us as a living thing today? How to build community in the former communist countries when Jewish traditions had been so severely eroded and suppressed? And some Jews asked: How do we help each other in these new circumstances?

A decade—the 1990s—that began in great uncertainty with deep fears about a revival of antisemitism—which we conveniently forget—and soon reached a low point with war and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, ended with clear evidence of a remarkable Jewish revival. We witnessed unprecedented public awareness of the Holocaust, a burgeoning of Jewish cultural activity, a movement to document and preserve Jewish heritage, an enormous growth in the publishing of books of Jewish interest, the revival of orthodoxy, development of new religious movements. And all this to a great degree in a continent which embraced the Jewish revival as a living expression of the new Europe. Jews had become part of the cultural mainstream. As Diana Pinto has said, the 90s in Europe can plausibly be called ‘the Jewish decade'.

How deep this revival is remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it would be truly churlish to underestimate such developments as the 500 per cent absolute increase in children attending full time Jewish schools in the UK; the surge in numbers attending Jewish days schools in France; working in 15 countries, the Lauder Foundation has created or supports 18 Jewish primary and secondary schools and 15 kindergartens, as well as a range of other educational projects. Then there is PAIDEIA, the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Stockholm, founded 3 years ago; the hugely successful Szarvas youth camp in Hungary; the women's teacher training college Beyt Chana in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. There are more than 80 Jewish museums in Europe and their European Association is meeting in Berlin as we speak. The European Association for Jewish Culture, set up 2 years ago, gives grants for cultural performance and production in music, literature, drama, painting, sculpture and has no shortage of applicants. The European Association of Jewish Studies has taken on a new significance as academic Jewish studies in Europe continue to expand.

I realise that this is perhaps rather an inadequate list and of course each positive development throws up its attendant problem. But I wanted to give you something of a flavour of the changes European Jewry has been undergoing before focusing on some key problems and challenges—but not ones at the micro level of Jewish life, rather those that relate to the situation of European Jewry as a whole.

I already referred to the new post-1989 dynamic which led some Jews to ask: How do we help each other in these new circumstances? And I think one of the most exciting results of the collapse of Communism was the coming together to share and learn from each other. We may be diverse, but across Europe it soon became clear that the problems faced are remarkably similar for us all, that we should work through them together, to find common solutions where possible. This impetus is what led to the revival, under the direction of Michael May, of what was the European Council of Jewish Social Service—it changed its name to the European Council of Jewish Communities—a JDC-founded and supported body helping grass roots organizations in Europe on welfare, education and culture—precisely the fundamentals that former Soviet bloc communities were grappling with. One important way that the ECJC and others tried to give shape and practical meaning to this desire to confront problems and challenges together, was in the form of a series of pan-European gatherings that have developed into the European GA. They began in Prague in 1995, followed by Strasbourg in 1997, Nice in 1999, Madrid in 2001 and the next will be in Budapest in 2004. But unfortunately, this Jewish Europeanism has been a fitful and not entirely satisfying or successful movement. The institutionalisation of mutual support—necessary if there is to be sustained delivery of practical help and advice from a facilitating central body—has not been terribly effective. Until it becomes so, European Jewish communities will never be able to benefit properly from the tremendous expertise that exists across the continent.

This means that, unless it gets organized, European Jewry will always be in a situation where those coming from outside Europe can pronounce and intervene with impunity. While there are international Jewish organizations, or American Jewish organizations with international agendas, playing a welcome and positive role in Europe there are others for whom showing the flag in Europe is to impress their constituencies, an extension of their domestic agendas. It has little to do with any understanding of what Jews in Europe are or want or need. Such organizations will always use Europe as their battleground unless European Jews take their collective future into their own hands.

There are a number of reasons for this inability to organize effectively at the pan-European level.

There is the split between the European Jewish Congress (EJC) and the European Council of Jewish Communities which seriously hampers Jewish progress in Europe. An agreement between the two bodies made many years ago means that the EJC is supposed to deal with political issues facing European Jewish communities, the ECJC deals instead with education, culture and welfare. But the EJC is practically moribund and does very little, yet guards its prerogatives in the political area with the backing of its master, the World Jewish Congress. The ECJC, on the other hand, is the body that most leaders, professionals and activists in the Jewish voluntary sector across Europe, prefer to be associated with. As a result, because such people have nowhere else to go to discuss such matters, it has become an ad hoc forum for airing political concerns. Yet without a mandate to engage in political activity, the ECJC cannot respond to this concern. The result: the virtual disenfranchisement of the Jewish population in relation to issues they need to face on the European level and which need to be taken up by community representatives.

This damaging but resolvable problem is symptomatic of two further problems. First, the weakness of Jewish leadership in Europe. Time and again we see national Jewish leaderships mired in the past, unable to offer positive visions of the future to their communities, fearful of Jewish diversity, naturally defensive towards the wider society, often more comfortable with a threat they can react to than with a complex social and political reality that requires engagement. If they behave this way at the national level, how much more problematic will their leadership be at the pan-European level?

Second, the largest and most powerful communities—the UK, France, Germany—fail to pull their weight in European forums. Yet without their full involvement, the status and resources they can bring to developing planned, effective policies and action on internal and external issues, Jews will never be able to organize successfully in Europe. Outsiders will continue to set the European agenda.

But there is a sign that change may be coming. Within the ECJC there is now a clear awareness of its weaknesses and of the damage poor pan-European organization is having. In a very positive move, it established a strategic planning commission to review its mission, organization and activities. And it is understood that the result will be a plan for major reform of the organization to make it serve the needs of European Jewry more effectively, to be introduced at the GA in Budapest next May.

With an effective pan-European structure in place, it would become possible to make the most of the fact that with a Europe-wide population of up to 2.5 million, the Jewish voice and Jewish voices have a right to be heard. The opportunities offered by an enlarging European Union to do the best for our communities could be seized—pursuing an agenda that is about the diverse reality of Jewish life in Europe today and also about how we relate to and interact with, and contribute to, our European civil societies. We know that in Brussels the European Commission would welcome a Jewish contribution to shaping a more tolerant and diverse Europe. To Europe's leaders and institutions, a reformed ECJC could emphasize the value of the contribution each community can make to society as a whole; it could help create a climate in which maintaining Jewish distinctiveness is an expression of society's common agenda and not an aberration.

To come back to the question of antisemitism: if those who paint a picture of an irredeemably antisemitic Europe are correct, the continuing Jewish revival I describe and the opportunities to improve the Jewish position by working through European institutions hardly seem credible.

Well, just as a dying European Jewry is a distortion of reality, so too the notion of a continent riddled with murderous antisemitism is a travesty of the truth. This does not mean for one moment that there is no antisemitism in Europe or that it presents us with no problems. Just because I say that apocalyptic scenarios are wrong does not mean that Europe is an antisemitism-free paradise. It's perfectly possible to reject the extreme view and still consider antisemitism a danger, even a rising danger.

The key thing is to get some sense of proportion here. The situation is different from country to country. Most of the perceived rise in antisemitic incidents in some countries is related to reactions to the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. In some countries there has been no perceived rise at all. The claim is that severe criticism of Israel in the media is just disguised antisemitism, the new antisemitism. No doubt some is, but Jews who love Israel are bound to blanch at extreme censure. It's easier to brand it as antisemitism than to confront the consequences of realizing that some of this criticism is justified. Judging by how antisemitism lessened considerably after the Oslo accords, I don't think that there's any doubt that a substantive and sustained move towards peace would transform the situation.

The truth is messy. Antisemitism never went away. Countervailing forces diminished its salience, reduced its threat. But it never disappeared. I would argue that in many ways the countervailing forces in Europe have got stronger. What's happened is that they have been more severely tested with rising international terrorism, Islamist fundamentalism, anti-globalization politics and reactions to the war in Iraq. And despite the existence of institutions to combat antisemitism in communities in Europe and antisemitism monitoring bodies elsewhere, I believe that Jewish establishments have developed a sense that because antisemitism is a problem for the antisemite and not for the Jew, sound policy-making on antisemitism is superfluous; jumping up and down when something happens is enough. If the EJC says ‘outrageous verbal attacks targeted at Jews have been greeted for years with only silence as a rebuke ', the obvious question is what has the EJC been doing for all these years to allow this to happen? Are they trying to say that all Europe's political leaders are antisemites? This would be nonsense, just as their statement is in fact nonsense. But certainly a more sustained and thoughtful policy on dealing with antisemitism in Europe, which relies on not demonising friends, but rather finding permanent ways to work with them, would pay dividends. We know that in France, where the worst anti-Jewish manifestations have occurred, reasoned criticism has been levelled at the way the French Jewish leadership attacked the French government for the way it handled the upsurge. And it seems they now see things differently. A leadership group willingly accompanied President Chirac to the United States and fully supported the view he presented to the administration that France is not an antisemitic country. In France incidents are sharply down and I'm told that the Geneva accord has led to a more positive climate and a more nuanced approach to Israel in politics and the media.

The UK is said to be the country with the second worst experience of the new wave of antisemitism and yet the Conservative Party just chose a Jew, Michael Howard, member of a synagogue, proud of his Jewish heritage, to be its leader, at a time of growing anti-asylum seeker, anti-immigrant sentiment and the party increasingly in the hands of the local activists, considered the most reactionary of all Tories, among whom genteel antisemitism is supposed to find its home.

In Turkey, where there is an Islamic party in government, the Jewish community is showing much greater assertiveness. This year it participated in the European Day of Jewish Culture for the first time. Last month, a government minister attended a Jewish function there for the first time, and he noted that Turkey's foreign minister spoke out against antisemitism in his speech to the OIC (where Mahatir spoke).

Some in the Russian Jewish community are so confident about their position that in May, Yevgeny Satanovsky, President of the Russian Jewish Congress said that they were getting together a delegation to go to France to help the community there with its antisemitism, since it is of such little consequence in Russia.

The point I emphasise again is that we need to examine antisemitism in the context in which it appears. It's of no help to us in Europe to exaggerate it and antagonise potential European allies. More than that, it's counterproductive. We mustn't devalue the currency; the consequences are serious. If we say the antisemitic threat is unprecedented, as bad now as before the war, we sully the memory of the millions of Jews who were dehumanized, persecuted and murdered at the hands of the Nazis and their associates.

I find the distorted/inaccurate attitudes that many have towards European Jewry symbolic of a deeper malaise affecting us: our inability to hear the hopes and fears of the other; our rush to adopt polarised positions that reflect preconceived notions; to blame others for misfortunes we may have brought upon ourselves. I find it very difficult to understand how we can help each other, how we live by the saying kol Israel arevim ze lazeh , if we cannot empathise with the lives of our fellow Jews as they are truly lived. That may be difficult for some in the case of Europe, because of Europe's historical baggage, but it has to be done. The social, political and cultural context in which Jewish lives in Europe are lived, may well be complex, but I think that the least we can ask is that Americans, Israelis and others make an effort to understand. If they do they will realise the bankruptcy of a view that sees only antisemitism and terminal decline.

Which brings me back to Frank Kermode's enigmatic little book, The Sense of an Ending . It was written at the time of the student riots, the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s when a sense of impending crisis prevailed. But predictions of revolution proved wrong. One reading of the book is as a response to this period; it shows that talk of crisis or apocalypse is a link in the chain of continuity by which mankind explains events. But—and this is what I saw as the essential relevance of the book to my talk— men's prediction of the end is continually being falsified and they are forced to adjust their patterns in the interest of reality.

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