The Jewish Community As a Force for Jewish Continuity: Professional Skills and Our Jewish Knowledge

We are a diverse group in our backgrounds, job would be to identify 2 or 3 major issues in The Jewish Community As A Force For Jewish Continuity: professional skills and our Jewish knowledge. Jewish life where the inputs of a professional We can, however, join together to act An Historical Perspective organization would have a maximum impact. coordinately from the context of our own After the issues were agreed upon 2 or 3 Joshua Prawer perspectives if we do not despair. Educator sub-units would be formed. It would be the Professor of Medieval History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel and case worker, community worker and task of each to then explore the issue, develop baC rounder r Center worker, field staff and line staff: all of Jlnf0"^"^^ ^ ^ f° Hussion groups at the Jerusalem meeting of resource materials, suggested action responses, us have much more which binds than separates theInternaUo nal Conference of Jewish Communal Service, August 13-17, 1978. It is an unusua, and consultative and advocacy roles as a survey of Jewish community organization through the ages. us. Shall we lament with the poet: professional body to the groups, associations, historian, the Kehila was first of all an institutions, organizations or government(s) The world that now . General Characteristics instrument of dealing with the outside world, involved. The $100,000 would be allocated by 1 go about in, Few are the institutions in the human the overall task force as it saw fit to provide Is not the world 1 was born into for the Jews, on the contrary, it was the basic history which could be compared to the Jewish the fiscal wherewithal for the accomplishment Or in which I grew up, It is a world structure of life, regulated by the precepts of Kehila. Rooted in notions of almost legendary of the tasks at hand. Changed like the sea in another light, Jewish existence, the framework in which a antiquity, the Jewish community organization I have suggested a number of issues. Others A storm light. A world man led his life, brought up his family and saw proved its vitality and endurance by its perma could develop many as more worthy of Of raging waves and sudden terror, his children grow and prosper. Anger . and fright. nence, its uninterrupted existence for more consideration. The Conference may become Despite the changes which off-and-on Legends are lost here, lost and forgotten. than two thousand years of history and its an association of professionals rather than a transformed the Kehila in the course of There is no magic here, no ardor — almost fabulous flexibility and faculty of conference of associations. Whether or not it history, some features were ever present and The full heart, the spirit uplifted — adaptation. Adaptation, however, was not an does, the task force approach could engage all recurrent. One has the impression that a gene Its songs are harsh, the sound is deafening. aim in itself. The aim was and remained that of us as professionals into responding where tic imprint of highest aritiquity featured its The young die quickly, without love, of safeguarding the existence of a nation, its and when appropriate as a corporate entity. characteristics. Historically, the Kehila is a Thrown to the sharks. legacy and its values, a nation scattered over Resolutions could become more than in We were few, but there were lions among us, descendant of one of the basic notions of continents, in ever changing surroundings and tentions for vehicles for action and reaction And singing birds. Judaism, namely that of Adath Adonai (the circumstances. A nation which existed for would be available. If the assessment approach This is a new world, without beauty, Community of God). Whatever the original more than two thousand years without a state, worked a permanent budget for the ongoing Without music, without rules. meaning of the expression, the religious and which today, after the creation of the process would be part of the Conference. As And everyone is writing, ingredient of the notion transmitted to all its State of Israel, exists in a particular way, when more complex functions arise so will the need Telling it like it is, making remarks, progenies in the ages to come a transcendental more than three-fourths of its sons and for fiscal support grow. The membership of And their books are read by millions dimension which made it different from other In the drug stores, in the libraries, in the daughters live outside its boundaries, found in the conference will find the wherewithal to and often similar institutions which existed schools. the Kehila a mechanism of self-preservation, respond if the need for greater funding in other cultures and religions. The Kehila But there is no pride of Lions in this world, an instrument to perpetuate patterns of life becomes manifest. Kedosha or Kahal Kadosh (Holy Community) No exultation of larks.24 and ideals of behaviour, accepted or recog As a Conference — we are like the Jewish carried with it the belief that the cohesion of I say we need not lament. There are still nized as incumbent and normative. people — in the process of becoming. We are the members was not only earthly bound and among us people who will be lions among us, Two thousand years of history etched in the doing so in a harsh and painful world. We are earthly aimed to fulfill specific tasks of who will who will try to change and Kehila organizational features created in a members of an idealistic profession serving a profess, existence, but that this particlar bond was help change for the better the things and given set of circumstances and then transmitted people whose ideals are wavering. The imbued with a sense of holiness, impregnated, people about us. I echo the words of Stephen from place to place and from generation to Eightieth birthday is known as Gevurah — so to say, with an everlasting presence of S. Wise in his challenge to this Conference generation. In that process, however, it shed strength. I believe this Conference has great Providence. This perception of the transcen when he exhorted: "Let us dare ..." Dare we characteristics no longer in tune with new strength. That includes the ability to return to dental created a particularity of bonds between do less in our own day? I think not. demands and circumstances, transforming the some of its early functions as a Conference. It the members of the Kehila; it added a spiritual obsolete and adding others conditioned by the was a forum for great debates, but most dimension to its raison d'etre. There was no exigencies of Jewish autonomous evolution importantly, it was a forum which led to 24 Robert Nathan, "The World That Now," need to take an oath of allegiance to the reprinted in Los A ngeles Times, November 11, 1977. and pressures of the external world. However, action. The action was, at times, in reaction to Kehila; one, being a Jew, was born into it, as the changes were far more marked in structure the needed and, at times, surprisingly in one was born into a faith or a nation. The and outward trappings than in the basic anticipation of that which was yet to be. Kehila as a collective and corporate body, and essence of the Kehila organization. Although those who served it as its leaders and officers, for the alien and for the more recent secular took on a responsibility not only to the living 22 23 Israel, especially since the late Roman Empire, members of the community, but also a respon entities isolated from each other. This ever a community. If there was no external inter when the last traces of official Jewish author sibility to Providence; a responsibility to present urge to find a larger framework of ference, like that by the ruling power, to ity lapsed into abeyance. And yet the bonds follow a given way of life, a pattern of existence drew its inspiration from the practi coerce a more uniform organization, the syna and links with the Holy Land did not entirely behaviour which made life not only possible, cal needs of the moment as well as from the gogues, which we may call "ethnic syna disappear. There were periods in history in but gave it a meaning, beyond the obvious desire to satisfy the feeling of belonging, of gogues," continued to thrive, perpetuating the which Palestinian Jewry claimed precedence, necessities of existence. It was not necessarily not being merely a small island surrounded by existence of particular groups. The recent even actual hegemony, over the mighty Jewish and not always the positive precepts of faith an enemy sea. Brothers reached out a hand to versions of landsmanschaften, whose outlook Diaspora in Babylon, a claim which was often which gave a religious dimension to the Kehila. find the warmth of kindred others. This ever at given periods was secularized, are historical expressed practically by a demand for terri It was rather the consciousness of responsi recurring phenomenon to create larger organi descendants of those kenista of Babylonian torial rights, as for example the claim to bility beyond space and time of every age zations took on a more particular form when and Palestinian Jews in medieval Egypt, or appoint Dayanim in far away Egypt. More which guarded its specific character. historical evolution created situations of small Spanish and Portuguese Jews in early modern and widely scattered settlements, sometimes often it took a different, non-formal character Holland. Another characteristic of the Kehila which simply few or even single families, in the of responsibility for the Jews in the Holy bore the sign of its inception was the almost But this type of pluralism was not always the vicinity of larger Jewish communities.

Load more