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Why does Syria suddenly need its last practicing Jew? It needs America.
In what used to be Syria’s old Jewish quarter, Bakhour Chamntoub, a 76-year-old tennis-playing bachelor, lives as the last practicing Jew in Syria and the de facto leader of Syria’s six-person-strong Jewish community.
Life has changed for Chamntoub since the highly oppressive Assad Regime fell in December 2024. Under Assad, he and the rest of Syria’s remaining Jews kept a low profile. Now, Chamntoub has become something of a local celebrity.
The Palestinian children in his neighborhood routinely knock on his door asking for tennis balls. One Muslim resident of Damascus said he calls Chamntoub “uncle.” And these days, he regularly hosts reporters, tourists, and academics in his home – something he says would have been impossible under Assad. Members of the Israeli media now call him their “No. 1 Jew,” he said.
When he walks in the street, neighbors greet him warmly. “‘Shalom, boker tov, shabbat shalom,’ everybody says to me!” he shared gleefully during a video conversation from his patio in Damascus.
As Syria seeks sanctions relief, foreign investment, and international legitimacy after decades of dictatorship, outreach to Jews has become a way for the new government to signal its newfound tolerance to the West. And it seems to be working. This week, President Donald Trump announced plans to remove Syria from the State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list for the first time since 1979.
But not everyone is on board. Several Syrian minority groups in the U.S. have been campaigning against lifting the remaining sanctions, fearing the government will persecute minorities once it secures Western support. Their concerns are not unwarranted: there have been several attacks on minority communities since the government’s rise to power, including some reportedly involving Syrian authorities.
A long history of decline
For years, Chamntoub has been the sole caretaker of Jewish life in Syria. He knows which Jewish families once lived in which homes, which of Syria’s 22 synagogues are still standing, and where generations of Syrian Jews are buried.
When a member of the community dies, Chamntoub is responsible for overseeing the burial process. Bodies of Jewish community members are taken to a Muslim burial office to be washed and prepared, before Chamntoub takes them to the Jewish cemetery. There, they are buried, though there are not enough Jews in the country to make a minyan, the minimum quorum of 10 Jewish men required by Jewish law to conduct communal religious services mandated for Jewish burials.
Syria’s Jewish community is among the oldest in the world, dating back more than 2,000 years. At its height, it numbered roughly 100,000 people, with communities concentrated in Aleppo and Damascus, but waves of persecution and political upheaval led to a mass exodus of Jews from Syria. Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Jews faced deadly pogroms and restrictions on emigration under successive Syrian governments. Many who attempted to leave the country were imprisoned, tortured or killed.
In 1992, when then-Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad finally permitted Syrian Jews to emigrate, thousands left en masse for Brooklyn, New Jersey, Israel and Mexico.
Chamntoub, who was born in 1950, witnessed almost every chapter of the community’s decline. He also lived through the reign of Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar al-Assad, a brutal leader who used chemical weapons on his own people to suppress dissent, and oversaw a 14-year-long civil war that resulted in the death of 400,000 Syrians.
In December 2024, Chamntoub found himself in the center of a new chapter of Syrian Jewish history after opposition forces toppled the Assad regime. Leading the charge was Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Al-Qaeda member who is now the self-appointed leader of the new Syrian government and trying to prove his days of terrorism are behind him. He dons a suit and goes by his birth name rather than the pseudonym he used during his time in al-Qaeda, al-Jolani. He speaks of making peace with his neighbors (Israel among them), and has expressed interest in bringing exiled Jews back to Syria.
This fall, al-Sharaa met with a group of Syrian American Jews in New York – though they avoided the topic of Israel. He has even appointed a designated official within the government whose job it is to engage with Syrian Jews in the diaspora.
Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the strategy is not new. During the Assad era, Syria’s ambassador to the United States in the early 2000s, Imad Moustapha, cultivated relationships with Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, attending bar mitzvahs and community events in hopes of easing Syria’s isolation.
“The charm campaign by Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new president, is clearly a continuation of the same strategy,” Landis said.
Indeed, most U.S. sanctions on Syria were lifted in May of 2025, due in part to lobbying in Washington by an American Syrian Jewish organization called the Jewish Heritage in Syria Foundation. Its leader Henry Hamra, the nephew of Syria’s last chief rabbi, has been the face of efforts to involve the Jewish diaspora in conversation about Syria’s future.
Through it all, Chamntoub never seriously considered leaving Syria, even as family members emigrated to the U.S. and Israel. He says he never felt like an outsider in the country. He enjoys living in his parents’ home among fruit trees and birds whose songs often drowned out the virtual conversation from his patio. He also enjoys his girlfriends in Syria, whom he says he can’t bear to leave.
He cleans his home for Shabbat every Friday, and prepares a meal to commemorate each Jewish holiday, though he says it is hard to get in the holiday spirit alone.
He also keeps kosher, a Herculean task in Syria. For years, Chamntoub ate a vegetarian diet, relying on a rabbi in Turkey to smuggle him kosher meat from time to time. Then, in 2018, he met a 24-year-old Syrian Jew living in Brooklyn named Joe Jajati.
Jajati was born in Syria and left the country at age 2. His grandfather was the head representative of the Jewish community in Syria and, according to Jajati, met frequently with then-President Assad.
Jajati always hoped to visit his birth country, and decided to make the trip after learning there was a Jewish man who remained there.
“I just wanted to meet him. I wanted to hear what he had to say,” Jajati told me.
The two met in Damascus and connected instantly. “After that, we became like best friends,” said Jajati, who has returned several times over the years, always with a suitcase full of kosher meat for Chamntoub.
After the Assad regime fell, Jajati felt the moment was ripe to change the way Syrians think of Jews, and the way Israelis and Americans view Syria.
‘We don’t represent the radical point of view’
Alongside Chamntoub, Jajati started the Syrian Mosaic Foundation, an organization that hopes to revive Jewish life in Syria and promote a more pluralistic future for the country. Chamntoub heads its Syria branch, working alongside Muslim and Christian staff, including Palestinians.
One of the foundation’s main initiatives is bringing delegations of Jews to Syria under armed government escort. The delegations are intended to foster relationships that were impossible under Assad.
Participants often include reporters and academics, among them David Horovitz, the editor-in-chief of The Times of Israel, and Dr. Susanna Heschel, the head of Jewish studies at Dartmouth.
After visiting the University of Damascus, Heschel brought a Syrian exchange student she met there to Dartmouth. She hopes he will be the first of many.
“I want to expose these young [Syrians] to Judaism, Jewish history, Zionism,” she said. “They don’t know anything. How could they? Nobody’s teaching that at the university.”
Jajati says the reason the new Syrian government supports this work is clear. “They want to show, not just the Jews, but the world that, ‘Look, we’re good now, we’re not what people think we are.’”
When the delegations come, they often stay at the Inana Hotel, a complex of homes that once belonged to Joe Jajati’s family. It sat empty for years until it was purchased and turned into a hotel by a Muslim family – a common fate for the property of Jews who fled Syria.
Maysara Al-Zoubi, a Mosaic staff member whose family owns the hotel, said he joined the organization in hopes of helping attract Western investment to Syria.
“You have to give investors a good example that we don’t represent the radical point of view,” he said. “We wanted to wash the image of the radical society, and to give another good image to bring these investors to the country.”
Critical to that, he said through a translator, is the work the Mosaic Foundation is doing to bring Jews back into the fabric of Syrian society.
In March, the organization restored its first synagogue, the El Frenj synagogue in Damascus. Last month, a group worked to clean up the tombstone of Rabbi Nissim Indib, the former head Rabbi of Syria. Indib is best known for having recited the Shema prayer with Israeli spy Eli Cohen before his execution.
With the help of Syria’s new police chief, Mosaic also managed to gain possession of several Jewish artifacts that were stolen and put on the black market in the midst of the chaotic fall of the Assad regime.
And this week, the organization began work to renovate Syria’s main Jewish cemetery.
‘They didn’t have exposure to Jews’
Jajati and Chamntoub also hope to impress upon Syrians a different view of Jews than was forced upon citizens under Assad.
“These people were closed off to the whole world the past few years,” Jajati told me. “They really didn’t have exposure to Jews under the Assad regime.”
Since the new government took power, the economic situation for most Syrians has worsened, with 90% of Syrians living in poverty. During Ramadan, Mosaic distributed hundreds of kilos of meat to non-Jewish residents from Chamntoub’s home in Damascus and at a mosque in Quneitra, the province bordering Israel that has seen repeated Israeli incursions since the Assad regime fell.
Mirna al-Rached, a Christian resident from Damascus, trekked to Chamntoub’s home for assistance.
“Bakhour put the meat neatly and gently in the bag, giving with a very nice smile on his face,” she recalled.
“It breaks the monotonous narrative that we always hear about the Jewish people,” she added. “You don’t know anything about them, except what you hear from the news, you know, the whole image about the Jewish people, about their racism, about wars, all the negative things.”
In April, after a Jewish person was reportedly threatened by a Hezbollah actor in Damascus, Mosaic installed solar-powered lights and cameras in the old Jewish Quarter as a security measure. But Jajati knows the move will benefit non-Jews living in the neighborhood as well. Years of economic collapse and electricity shortages have left many Damascus streets pitch black at night.
Now, the company that installed the lights and cameras for that project has committed to helping the organization rebuild synagogues in Syria.
“That would be the first time someone contributes with us, and it’s a Muslim Syrian company,” said Jajati, who has thus far funded Mosaic’s initiatives himself.
But many in the Syrian Jewish diaspora in the U.S. are skeptical of the engagement.
Mourdi, a member of the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn said he remains deeply suspicious of the new government. He asked to be identified only by his first name in case he ever pursues a property claim in Syria.
Mourdi left Syria at 24 and said his family’s home and store, like those of many Syrian Jews, were transferred through fraudulent court proceedings after they fled the country. He believes the only way for the new government to earn the community’s trust is by voiding those transactions and restoring confiscated property.
“They want to show the world that they are close to the Jews, that they want them to come back, but nobody’s gonna come back,” he said.
“You want the Jews back? Make an executive order: Any Jewish property that was sold through the court is unacceptable. And after that, I’m gonna show you, 80% of our community is gonna go back to get their property,” he said.
He pointed to an episode after al-Sharaa took power in December 2024, when the new president reportedly reclaimed his own family’s former home, which had been occupied by another family under the Assad regime.
“This is my family’s house, and we have many memories here, so we’d like it back now,” al-Sharaa reportedly told the occupants before they vacated.
Mourdi said he raised the issue of property restitution with American advocates working with the new government, but never received a response.
“For us, Syria is like somebody who died,” he said. “If you try to wake him up, it’s not gonna work. But some people think, ‘No, we can bring him back.’”
Chamntoub also has reservations. While he welcomes the fact that Jews can once again visit Syria, he worries the government’s outreach will end there.
Jewish property has been seized by the state, he said. And while he is grateful for the greater freedom to express his religion and opinions publicly, he fears the government has little interest in hearing them. He briefly considered running for a seat in Syria’s legislature but ultimately decided it would be pointless.
“If I can’t express my opinions frankly… I’m not interested in being in the assembly,” he said.
Though Chamntoub has become the public face of Syria’s tiny Jewish community, the Syrian government has yet to recognize him in any official capacity.
“Everyone in the world considers me the leader of Syria’s Jewish community,” he added, “except the Syrian government.”
Neither Chamntoub nor Jajati have any delusions that they will manage to bring the Jewish community back to Syria. While Jajati says many American Syrian Jews have told him they’re interested in visiting the country, no one has plans to settle there.
“There’s no Syrian, forget about Jews, there’s no Syrian that is living in America wants to go back to live in Syria,” said Jajati.
“My dream is that it becomes like the Emirates, like Dubai,” he added. “The reality is, I hope it doesn’t become another Libya. All Syrians have to do their part so that we don’t let it get there.”
Chamntoub answered instantly when asked if he thinks the six Jews remaining in Syria will be the last: “For sure.”
After a heavy silence, he burst into laughter and cracked a joke to his translator that he might need to marry all of his girlfriends to change that.
The translator explained: “He said he will have to marry like 10 women at the same time!”
The post Why does Syria suddenly need its last practicing Jew? It needs America. appeared first on The Forward.
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UK Jewish groups express concern as the likely next PM criticizes Israel over Gaza
(JTA) — Andy Burnham, who is on track to become Britain’s next prime minister following Keir Starmer’s resignation last month, apologized for his party’s handling of the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas mass killings in Israel, saying that it should have done more to push for a ceasefire and called for exerting greater pressure on the Jewish state today.
His comments prompted a joint response from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, which said they had contacted his team to express “significant concerns” about his remarks.
Burnham made his comments in a video statement on Thursday in response to questions from the public. Burnham is likely to become the next prime minister after gaining the overwhelming support of sitting Labour members of Parliament. To date no one has challenged him for the party’s leadership ahead of a July 17 deadline.
“I know many people feel that at the start of Israel’s military action in Gaza, my party didn’t get it right, and I am sorry about that,” he said. He added that he supported further sanctions on Israelis involved in the violence in Gaza, measures to ban trade with Israeli settlements and restrictions on arms licenses to Israel, saying there was “increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed.”
He also condemned increased antisemitism in Britain, and said that tackling antisemitism did not contradict holding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to account.
His comments came as lawmakers across the political spectrum have pushed for increased condemnation of Israel and sanctions on the country.
“The unbearable suffering in Gaza is a scar on our collective conscience,” Burnham said. “The killing of innocent Palestinians, including children,” was “completely unacceptable,” he added, declaring that Britain had to do more to “put pressure on the Israeli government.”
He described the country as “too slow to call for a ceasefire” and that “we must now do more to strengthen our approach” as “Israel continues to violate the ceasefire agreement killing innocent Palestinians.”
In their response, the Board and JLC said they shared “concern for the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip” but stated that the conflict “cannot be understood without reference to the role of Hamas not only in launching the conflict but in perpetuating the war through the holding of hostages, war-fighting entirely from within the civilian population, and [their] ongoing refusal to cede power and disarm, in line with the 20 point peace plan.”
They added that the conflict also could not be understood without reference to Hamas’ regional backers and allies, including Iran and Hezbollah. Burnham addressed none of this in his comments.
Burnham did, however, reiterate his condemnation of Hamas, describing the Oct. 7 attacks as “monstrous,” stressing that he denounced them “as strongly today as I did in the immediate aftermath.”
He said that he also condemned “the increase in appalling antisemitic attacks here in the U.K. and those who seek to divide our communities by targeting Jewish people.”
“I felt first-hand the anxiety in our Jewish community and the very real threat they face,” the former mayor of Greater Manchester said, referring to the Yom Kippur 2025 attack on the city’s Heaton Park synagogue in which two people were killed.
The Board and JLC welcomed Burnham’s “zero tolerance approach to antisemitism” and affirmed his assertion that “there is no contradiction between fighting antisemitism and disagreeing with actions of the Israeli government.”
However, they said, “Antisemitism cannot be confronted without addressing all its drivers,” arguing that in Britain that includes “Islamist, far left and far right extremists who go beyond criticism of the Israeli government to a place of hatred directed at Jews and Israelis.”
Their joint statement pointed out that Burnham knew “first hand the links between hatred of Israel, antisemitic extremism and deadly violence against British Jews,” adding that, “in a country in which antisemitism has become more normalized, more extreme and more violent, we call on our leaders to show the utmost care in their rhetoric in relation to the conflict.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK Jewish groups express concern as the likely next PM criticizes Israel over Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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NY congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier doubles down on attending Oct. 8 pro-Palestinian rally
(JTA) — Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier defended her presence at a pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel during a wide-ranging interview Friday with progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart.
“I think the targeting of civilians is wrong in any context, including on Oct. 7,” Avila Chevalier said when asked by the editor-at-large of the leftist Jewish Currents about slogans legitimizing “resistance” that appeared at the rally. Avila Chevalier previously defended her attendance at the rally to City & State in June.
“I think what matters is international law, and what international law condemns and protects,” she said. “And it condemns the targeting of civilians, and it also protects the right to resist.”
Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, pushed back, saying that he “didn’t see any discussion of international law in that rally on the signs or the slogans of the kind that you are offering now … Were you uncomfortable by that?”
Avila Chevalier responded that, at any protest, there will always be “folks who are voicing opinions that you might not agree with.”
“I knew even as early as Oct. 8, right, where this cycle was headed, and I knew the things that I did have power over,” Avila Chevalier said. “The thing that we have power over is the fact that our tax dollars are going towards an apartheid state that has a pattern of engaging in this type of retribution against civilians.”
Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who helped organize pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, ousted incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat last month in the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, which covers parts of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
“Today we make it clear. The politics of the past ends today,” Avila Chevalier told attendees at an election night watch party, where the crowd erupted into cheers of “Free Palestine.”
She joined two other progressive and Israel-critical candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in winning upset primary victories, cementing the anti-Israel mayor’s influence in the city’s politics and likely extending the left’s gains in Congress since the wins came in deeply Democratic districts.
Beinart’s interview offered an extensive look into the Israel-related positions that became flashpoints during Avila Chevalier’s campaign, including her attendance at the Oct. 8 rally, which was condemned at the time by Mamdani and fellow congressional candidate Brad Lander, and past criticism of former President Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel and Gaza in a since-deleted X account.
Many of the attendees on Friday’s Zoom call appeared unimpressed by the candidate’s responses.
“She is well intentioned, but also clearly is not familiar with the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Hillel Schenker, a veteran American-Israeli peace activist.
Other attendees defended Avila Chevalier.
“I am surprised and disturbed by many of the comments made here that are just dismissing her comments and her approach to expressing her belief in human rights and a world without hierarchies of peoples,” wrote an attendee with the screen name Benjy Ben Baruch.
To kick off the interview, Avilia Chevalier described her internship in the West Bank as a 20-year-old Columbia University student, saying that at the time she observed “systems and how they were impacting Palestinian people and Jewish folks, and how people were being treated based off of those state structures.”
Beinart then asked Avila Chevalier why she believed Israel had become so “central for progressive politics.”
“I think there is a war machine that is insatiable,” Avila Chevalier replied. “An American war machine, the Israeli war machine, that we fund with our tax dollars as Americans, and instead what we could be funding is our communities.”
When asked by Beinart what she wanted to see as the future of the region, Avila Chevalier voiced her support for a one-state solution, which she described as “one governing body, one state that sees everyone as equal before the law, regardless of race, religion, identity, ethnicity.”
“We have seen over the course of history that attempts at two states have failed, and even so, I think in this question of like, well, do we partition to begin with, that inherently is divisive,” Avila Chevalier said.
Avila Chevalier also stopped short of saying that “Zionism is racism” when asked if she agreed with the statement by Beinart.
“Zionism is an ideology that creates this type of hierarchy that I’m talking about, and I just don’t believe that we should be striving for a world where there is a hierarchy among people,” Avila Chevalier replied.
Towards the end of the conversation, Beinart referenced scrutiny Avila Chevalier had drawn for her 2022 statements in which she condemned Dominican nationalism and said it was the reason she didn’t put the flag in her social media bio.
“What do you see as the fundamental differences between Zionism as a form of Jewish nationalism, the Dominican nationalism that you have had some concerns about, and Palestinian nationalism,” Beinart asked Avila Chevalier, whose parents are Dominican immigrants.
In response, Avila Chevalier referenced racist attacks she had endured for those comments in the lead-up to the election.
“While it’s not the majority of Dominicans, I would never say that, I think there is a faction that supports this ideology that I have just always found incredibly violent, and the type of rhetoric that I was subjected to, I think, is reflective of the very thing I was criticizing, and I see a lot of that in Zionism as well,” Avila Chevalier responded.
The candidate added that, in contrast to Zionism and Dominican nationalism, Haitian and Palestinian discussions of “liberation” were rooted in “a more universalist understanding of human rights before the law.”
“When I was there in Palestine, you know, some of the most dehumanizing language I’ve ever heard, right, was coming from Israeli soldiers towards children,” Avila Chevalier said, adding that she saw the movements “in very different lights.”
When asked whether she worried that “Hamas’s version of Palestinian nationalism may have exclusionary elements as well,” Avila Chevalier replied: “That’s why I worry about nationalism point blank.”
“Nationalism itself always gives me pause, but I think it’s important to also consider the context in which we’re talking about, like what group is engaging in this conversation, right, and the power dynamics at play there,” Avila Chevalier continued.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Many young Jews support a binational state. That doesn’t mean they’re anti-Zionist.
(JTA) — There are three kinds of young Jews the headlines keep confusing: the anti-Zionist, the non-Zionist and the young Jew who loves being Jewish, shows up, feels bound to other Jews, and cannot tell you what happened in 1967. The last is by far the most common kind I meet as the executive director of Hillel at Brandeis University.
The anti-Zionists are certain they have thought it through, and conclude that the Jewish state should not exist. The non-Zionist wants to be Jewish without making the Israel they see in the news central to their Jewishness. The third stays bound to Israel and its people, and wants it safe, democratic and Jewish, even when its government disappoints them. That is because Israel has become part of what it means to be Jewish now, like Torah study or acts of kindness, something you can wrestle with or resent but not simply set down.
A recent poll found nearly half of American Jews under 35 agree that a single binational state of Jews and Palestinians is the best resolution of the conflict. The headlines around the poll imply that these young supporters are anti- or non-Zionist. But I suspect many of those who embraced the idea do not reject Zionism but are expressing something else altogether.
The survey asked which of three resolutions is best. The first, two states for two peoples, looks dead after the peace process has repeatedly failed to deliver that outcome for their entire lives. It’s certainly not an option according to the Israeli consensus, with only 15% of Israeli Jews currently supporting two states.
The second, in which Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza and rules millions of Palestinians who cannot vote, seems to be the vision of Israel’s current government.
The third option, one democratic country, imagines equal rights for everyone. To a young American of decent instincts and thin knowledge of the region, schooled to see the conflict as a matter of racial equality, the last sounds like simple justice: one person, one vote. Choosing it is not the same as joining an anti-Zionist movement, even if barely 1% of Israeli Jews back it.
Why then would a young Jew, proudly Jewish and emotionally bound to other Jews, embrace such a plan?
It’s because this generation is already too loosely tied to the history and people of Israel to distinguish between a government and a country. The war in Gaza brought this into view. Young Jews today never knew Israel as the underdog of 1948 or 1967. And this generation has simply spent less time there than their peers did a few years ago.
There are many ways to visit Israel: a family trip, a high school or youth group trip, a college internship. For close to 15 years, at Hillels in Michigan, Chicago and now Waltham, Massachusetts, I have taken hundreds of students to Israel, dozens of non-Jewish students to Israel and the Palestinian territories, and worked with thousands more.
Birthright was meant to add to that mix. Yet for many it became the only trip, and even that has diminished: from 50,000 a year before COVID to 20,000 in 2024. Young adults, forming their views now, have visited the least. It is hard to feel bound to a people you’ve never met.
And yet there is another story, and not just a Jewish one. In 2025, Gallup found American pride had fallen to a record low, also along generational lines: Just 41% of Gen Z say they are extremely or very proud to be American, versus 75% of baby boomers and more still among their elders.
Young Americans are loosening their grip on inherited attachments across the board, and young Jews’ disaffection with Israel is one instance of that drift rather than a singular act of rejection. Politics is also dampening their pride: For Jews, the government of Netanyahu and Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir; for polarized Americans, whichever administration sits in Washington.
That parallel points toward the repair. If your attachment to a country rests only on its current government, it collapses the day you cannot stand that government. So defending this Israeli coalition is a losing errand, and the wrong one.
Another round of advocacy training will not do it either. You cannot argue someone into a bond. It makes better debaters, not deeper ties, and too often it binds students to defending a government rather than a people. It is not fair to ask them to defend war aims the government itself has never clearly named.
And bringing more young Jews to Israel, however important that is, is not enough. The real work is to build the connection on something sturdier than politics and more lasting than a week on a bus: Jewish texts and traditions, mentors who bring both intellectual rigor and spiritual depth, and a shared sense of kinship with the largest Jewish community in the world.
Israel is now home to nearly half of all Jews alive. A young Jew who feels bound to that people holds a connection that can survive a government they find objectionable. As we’ve seen in the hundreds of local celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary, our love of country, at its best, can rise above whoever happens to be president. Our connection to Israel can rest on the same kind of ground.
I used to think the job of drawing young Jews to Israel was mostly a matter of better education, more Hebrew and more history. I still believe in those. But literacy lasts only when it is part of a Jewish life that is felt and lived, and the deeper work is to grow roots no argument can pull up. That comes from vibrant Shabbat tables, from Torah studied slowly with someone who loves both the student and the book, from time in Israel, early and often.
Some warn that the Zionist majority among American Jews may evaporate within a generation. Perhaps it will. But note the gap between the 37% of American Jews who call themselves Zionist and the 88% who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state. Even if the label slips, the bond endures.
It is the everyday work of Hillel and Jewish educators on hundreds of campuses, here and around the world, to strengthen that bond. The students in this poll are not a cohort to be scolded, or a problem to be scoffed away. We are the ones who let their attachments to Israel grow thinner in their formative years, and the repair is ours to make.
Given how little we have given them, it is remarkable how many still feel bound at all.
Rabbi Seth Winberg is executive director of Hillel at Brandeis, the university’s senior Jewish chaplain and a doctoral candidate in American Jewish history. The views expressed in this piece are his own.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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