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Fighting food allergies becomes another ritual at synagogues, schools and camps
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — No challah on Shabbat for those with celiac disease or wheat allergies. No cheesecake for Shavuot for those with dairy allergies. No mishloach manot gift packages on Purim for kids with severe allergies to the treats inside.
Synagogues and other Jewish organizations are seeing a rise in the number of children and teens who suffer from food allergies, and are adjusting to make sure that no one is endangered or feels left out – from nut-free policies to separate gluten-free kitchens.
For some, however, such accommodations aren’t enough to make them feel part of the mainstream.
“I try not to let it get the best of me, but in the back of my mind I’m like ‘wow, I really wish I could try what everyone else is trying,’” said Micah Pierandri, 17, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who often feels disconnected from others during community events involving food.
More children and teens are being diagnosed with food allergies than ever. In 2007, only about 4% of children in the United States under 18 reported food allergies, but last year the number more than doubled. A 2020 review of hospital admissions data showed a global increase in hospitalizations for anaphylaxis, a severe and potentially life threatening allergic reaction. One study found that 37% of children in an Orthodox Jewish community had food allergies.
Food allergies can have a significant impact on a person’s mental health. Up to 40% of parents of children with allergies said that they would associate the word “isolating” with their child’s allergy, according to a study by Allergy UK. And while many synagogues are taking steps to become more allergy friendly, holidays and religious events involvinging food can be a struggle for many children and teens with food allergies.
“I’m that allergy kid that has to sit out or bring their own dessert or their own food to events,” said Pierandri.
Pierandri, who has an airborne allergy to peanuts and severe allergies to pecans, walnuts, soy and eggs, often brings her own food to synagogue events. This can make her feel separated from the rest of the Jewish community during the holidays, even if her food is similar to her peers.
Tu Bishvat and Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, are especially difficult to celebrate because of the foods that are involved. On Tu Bishvat, the springtime New Year of the Trees, it’s customary for people to eat nuts and try fruits that they haven’t tasted before. For Pierandri, who has oral allergy syndrome, eating most fruits could cause an allergic reaction. Many Israeli dishes contain sesame or nuts, and her mild sesame allergy and severe nut allergies mean that she struggles to find foods that are safe for her to eat on Yom Ha’atzmaut, forcing her to choose between bringing her own food or eating before she goes.
By listing the ingredients in all food dishes at events, Beth El Temple Center in Belmont, Massachusetts makes it easier for people with food allergies to be included. Around 10% of students at their religious school have allergies. Though the number hasn’t changed much over the past few years, it is high enough that all teachers are notified about students’ allergies, said Joan Perlman, its director of education.
“It’s important to accommodate people with food allergies because it aligns with our core value of being an inclusive community,” said Debbie Ezrin, executive director of Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, Maryland. To her, inclusivity means making sure that everyone feels like they belong. Their congregation is a nut-free facility and works to accommodate people with food allergies during any event involving food.
Josephine Schizer (left) at dinner with a friend. (Courtesy)
“While the synagogue adheres to traditional Jewish dietary laws, we always ask people to share their dietary needs and do our best to accommodate them,” said Rabbi Daniel Kaiman of Congregation B’nai Emunah, the synagogue that Pierandri attends.
She also feels like her food allergies have stunted her BBYO experience. “Part of me feels like it’s not really having food allergies, it’s more like people not being cautious,” Pierandri said. She’s been to multiple chapter and regional events where there have been peanuts even though people are aware that she has an airborne allergy.
“This is one of the areas where we really try to make sure that we’re accommodating our teens and I think it’s a small step we can take towards creating a supportive, inclusive, welcoming environment,” said Drew Fidler, director of BBYO’s Center for Adolescent Wellness.
Like many other organizations, BBYO has seen an increase in the number of teens with allergies over the past decade. All of BBYO’s conventions are peanut and tree nut-free in order to accommodate teens with nut allergies, and the organization also offers vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and dairy-free meals by request.
“They just want to participate and feel normal and be a part of what’s going on,” she said about members who might feel excluded because of their allergies. At its international convention and summer programs, BBYO has a dedicated area for special meals so that teens with dietary restrictions are able to eat during meals.
Many Jewish summer camps are taking similar steps towards inclusion. “We always tell families that food should never be a reason that campers cannot be at camp or participate in Jewish life,” said Rabbi Ami Hersh, director of Ramah Day Camp in Nyack, New York.
Around 10% of the 800 campers that attend each session have food allergies, a larger percentage than in past years. The camp has a dietary specialist who works with each family to find alternative meals for campers. It’s important that the alternative meals closely mirror what the other campers are eating “so that no one’s feeling left out or excluded based on food needs,” Hersh said.
“I think that sometimes food needs and allergies are misunderstood as something that people are just being difficult about,” he said. “No one wakes up in the morning and says ‘I really wish I had a food allergy.’”
After noticing an increasing number of campers with celiac disease, NJY Camps, an organization that runs five Jewish summer camps in eastern Pennsylvania, opened a dedicated gluten-free kitchen in 2011.
Taking care of children with food allergies costs US families over $25 billion each year. When parents have to provide food for their children, it can be expensive and isolate the child even further. In a study by Dalhousie Medical School, all 56 gluten-free products tested were more expensive when compared to their regular counterparts.
At NJY Camps, the camp charges the same for the gluten-free meal plan as for the regular meal plan. “We don’t charge families extra despite the additional cost, it is simply a courtesy provided to those who need it,” said Carrie Youngs, director of Camp Nah-Jee-Wah, its camp for younger kids. Within the last five years, they’ve had as few as 30 and as many as 60 gluten-free campers register for each session.
The gluten-free kitchen has separate staff, equipment and serving area to avoid cross contamination. Like Ramah Day Camp, NJY Camps try to make the gluten-free meals match the regular meals being served that day so that campers with dietary restrictions won’t feel left out.
“Because we’re a kosher camp, some allergies are just a good fit,” she said. The camp doesn’t have to make accommodations for allergies like shellfish because shellfish aren’t kosher. Camp Nah-Jee-Wah is also completely peanut free in order to accommodate campers who have airborne peanut allergies.
Before arriving at camp, families are able to meet with an allergy liaison who ensures that all of their needs are met. “We just feel that accommodating campers and giving them the most incredible camp experience is important for their upbringing,” Youngs said.
Eating away from home can be scary for people with food allergies, especially when those allergies are life-threatening. “My house is the space where I feel most comfortable when it comes to food,” said Josephine Schizer, 21, a sophomore at Harvard University. She’s allergic to eggs, dairy, sesame seeds, chickpeas, kiwi, lentils and peas, but thanks to her school’s Hillel, she’s been able to eat safely while she’s away from home. She’s developed a relationship with the Hillel’s dining hall staff and made them aware of her food allergies. They’ll often make special meals for her so that she’s able to eat.
Her allergies don’t usually make eating a problem during Jewish holidays, but on Passover, a holiday that imposes additional dietary restrictions, she struggles to find nutritious meals because there are fewer options. “Many of the options that I could normally eat are out of the question during Passover because of the holiday or have egg in them because flour gets replaced with egg,” Schizer said. Nearly everyone in her family has allergies, making it easier for her to celebrate Jewish holidays at home.
“I think it’s harder when I’m in places that aren’t my own home,” she said. “It’s harder, but it’s still doable.”
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The post Fighting food allergies becomes another ritual at synagogues, schools and camps appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that.
On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual cargo: children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah, crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.
Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.
“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”
Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.
In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.
But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.
Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.
Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.
That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.
“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.
Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.
The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.
The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.
At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.
“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”
They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.
The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.
Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”
Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.
But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.
Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.
Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.
The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.
Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.
“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”
“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”
Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.
For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.
Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.
But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.
“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”
Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.
“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”
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U.S. ambassador calls settlers who sieged Palestinian homes in Qusra ‘terrorists’
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The West Bank settlement movement’s leadership joined with one of its most prominent defenders, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, in condemning an Israeli settler outpost set up in a Palestinian family’s yard.
Huckabee’s remarks are a signal of the degree to which a group of radicals is rattling Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Israelis affiliated with the West Bank’s Tel Talpiot outpost, which is illegal under Israeli law, set up temporary structures at the entrances to Palestinian homes on the outskirts of the village of Qusra on Sunday.
Earlier this week, cables connecting the homes to the electricity grid and to solar panels were cut, and water pipes were damaged, leaving the Palestinian families unable to leave or bring in food. Israeli activists in the area who monitor settler attacks on Palestinians confirmed the account to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Huckabee wrote on X on Thursday that Israeli forces had gone to Qusra at the U.S. Embassy’s request and described the people who set up the outpost as “Israeli terrorists.” He posted that “the IDF & Israel Police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this.”
The language was a departure for the ambassador, who told Israel’s Channel 14 last September that the United States “respects Israel as a sovereign state and will not tell Israel what to do” regarding sovereignty in the West Bank. Huckabee has also consistently described the territory by its biblical names Judea and Samaria. He routinely takes to social media to dismantle what he says are lies depicting Israelis as unfairly treating Palestinians.
He has condemned settler violence before, but has rarely done so in language as blunt as what he used on Thursday. In July 2025, he visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank after an arson attack at its fifth-century church and called it an “act of terror and crime.”
The actions of Israeli settler extremists have been a major concern to Democrats in the U.S. Congress in recent months, adding fodder to their calls to condition aid to Israel on its behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists the reports are overblown, and that Palestinian violence is much more serious. President Donald Trump, who has often supported Netanyahu, has called on the prime minister to crack down on the violence, seeing it as an impediment to his hopes for a broader Middle East peace. Huckabee’s intervention suggests that the Trump administration is increasingly concerned about ending the violence.
Yisrael Ganz, who chairs the Yesha Council and governs the Binyamin Regional Council, condemned the outpost.
“The events in Qusra are serious and do not reflect our values or our way of conducting ourselves,” Ganz said. “There is no place for individuals to take matters into their own hands and establish an outpost in someone’s backyard, even when dealing with an illegal home or an attempt to seize control of the land. There is no justification whatsoever for violence against uninvolved civilians or security forces.”
He added that some were “exploiting these events as part of a campaign against the Jewish communities,” but that this “must not obscure the simple truth: What happened in Qusra was wrong and is unacceptable to us.”
Huckabee amplified Ganz’s statement later on Thursday, writing on X, “’Settlers’ are not the problem in Judea/Samaria. ‘Unsettlers’ are,” he wrote, describing them as “very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families & to Israel.”
The village is located in Area B, territory that is under the civil jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority and security control of the Israeli military and where Israeli settlement is not permitted. The Israel Defense Forces called such takeovers illegal and reprehensible on Tuesday. Overnight Wednesday, Israeli security forces said they demolished the structures at Qusra and detained one Israeli.
Marmar Odeh, a village representative, told JTA that the Israeli military remained inside Qusra, and footage circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers stationed inside the homes of evacuated residents.
“I won’t be going anywhere. I am staying in my house and on my land,” Odeh said. “I may not be scared, but the children are all the time.”
In a voice memo recorded on August 12 and obtained by JTA, Aisha Abu Rida, a Qusra resident, spoke from inside one of the besieged homes.
“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast,” she said. “Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast … and stay in our homes.”
By Thursday, the structures were gone, but settlers remained on the hillsides above the homes, Odeh said, an account supported by footage he provided to JTA. Soldiers had left most of the homes they had entered, residents said Friday, but were informed the military operation could last until Sunday.
One of the affected homes belongs to Loui Ridi, a Toledo, Ohio, business owner who was born in Qusra and has followed the standoff through security cameras installed at the property. JTA attempted to reach Ridi through several channels and was unsuccessful.
Asked whether the State Department shared Huckabee’s characterization and whether the Embassy had requested the Israeli operation, a State Department spokesperson did not directly reply. “We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank,” the spokesperson said. “We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank. A stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”
In a statement to JTA, the Israeli military said soldiers had been deployed in Qusra since Thursday morning “to protect the residents and maintain security in the area” and that they had been instructed that “the Qusra residents will remain in their homes.”
It added that troops would not operate inside the Palestinian family’s home near the site “where the tent that was evacuated and dismantled had been erected” and said Civil Administration liaison officers were in contact with Qusra’s local leadership and “working to avoid disruption to the daily lives of the residents in the area.”
Footage circulating earlier in the week appeared to show Israeli soldiers praying alongside the settlers at the outpost. The military said that the incident is under review and that soldiers found to have taken part in illegal activity would be disciplined.
The designation of Area B is the source of the ambiguity, according to Hanan Greenwood, head of the spokesperson and public diplomacy unit at the Binyamin Regional Council.
The council’s jurisdiction covers the settlements themselves, Greenwood said, not Area B land, meaning Qusra sits inside the council’s footprint but outside its authority. Its residents fall under Palestinian Authority civil jurisdiction and pay the council no arnona, the Israeli municipal tax.
“Geographically, Qusra is very much in our area,” Greenwood said. “But in real life, it’s not that we could go there, and it’s not that the residents of Qusra pay us.”
He described the result as a governance vacuum. “It’s ours, it isn’t ours,” he said. “It’s a whole mess, and the reason is that there’s no sovereignty.”
Israeli rights groups reject that framing, arguing that the military has the authority to remove outposts and does not use it.
The Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the events reflect a broader pattern.
“What is happening in Qusra is not an isolated incident,” said Yuli Novak, the organization’s executive director. “Settler militias, backed by the Israeli military, are expanding their attacks into Palestinian villages and towns, seizing land, attacking homes and forcing families out. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in plain sight.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Some young Jews are pulling back from Jewish life over Israel discourse, study finds
(JTA) — Nearly four in 10 Jewish young adults say events affecting Jews in recent years have led them to pull back from Jewish spaces or become more selective about where they participate, with disagreements over how Israel and the Palestinians are discussed as a leading reason, according to a new survey.
The survey, which was conducted by Sense Worldwide and commissioned by the Jim Joseph Foundation, found that 39% of respondents have engaged less, engaged more selectively or disengaged entirely from Jewish spaces due to “events affecting Jewish people in the last few years.”
Among those nearly 40% of respondents, 42% of them said that it was because their “views don’t align with how Israel/Palestine is discussed, and I don’t feel there’s room for nuance,” and 40% said they engaged less because they did not want to “experience biased, one-sided messaging.” Forty-eight percent said it was because “conversations often feel hostile, toxic, or unproductive.”
And among all respondents, when asked what would make Jewish experiences more appealing to them, 30% said that they would be attracted to experiences that were more cultural and less religious, and 26% said “spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.”
At the same time, the study found that young Jews have hardly abandoned Jewish life. Three-quarters of Jewish young adults in the United States say they regularly do something Jewish, though most are finding their connections outside of synagogues and traditional Jewish institutions, according to the study.
A small group of participants, 4%, also offered an explanation of the lasting impact that Jewish experiences had had on them. The study found that the clearest negative theme among those respondents was disillusionment around Israel and Zionism and the way it was presented in Jewish education or community spaces.
“A negative legacy I have been reflecting on is what I now understand to be a biased education/perspective on Israel,” one respondent wrote.
The study surveyed 2,071 Jewish adults aged 22 to 40 from December 2025 through April 2026. Respondents were sampled from panels created by NORC and GenLabs, and the margin of error was +/- 3.4%.
The survey found that 75% of Jewish young adults say they regularly do something Jewish in their lives, with 45% saying their only form of participation was informally, often at home with family or friends.
Just 30% said they regularly participate formally in Jewish life, including through institutions or organizations.
That divide was also reflected in where respondents said they most often feel a sense of Jewish connection. Fifty-five percent cited family and 44% cited Jewish friends, compared with 19% who cited Jewish community organizations or groups.
Sixteen percent said they found connection through social or political causes connected to Jewish identity, and 13% said they felt most connected through experiences related to Israel.
“The research gives us a much fuller and accurate understanding of where, how, and why Jewish young adults seek out and experience Jewish life,” said Stacie Cherner, the director of research and learning at the Jim Joseph Foundation, in a statement. “Now, importantly, we can begin to translate these insights to action.”
Another study of Jewish engagement across generations by the Jewish Federations of North America in March found that 40% of Jewish American adults describe themselves as engaged with their local Jewish community, while 60% were unengaged.
When asked how often they take part in “anything that feels Jewish,” 20% of respondents said very often or often, while 24% said sometimes, 33% said rarely and 22% said never, the new survey found. Those without earlier Jewish experiences were much less likely to participate at all.
Among those who rarely or never participate in Jewish life, 52% said it was because they “don’t feel a strong connection to Jewish life,” while 38% said it “feels too religious” and 36% said it “doesn’t feel relevant to my life right now,” the survey found.
Among the 11% who have engaged more with Jewish spaces in recent years, the most common reason was wanting to feel a stronger sense of solidarity with the Jewish community, cited by 71%.
And of that 11%, 61% said they wanted to “be around people who understand what I’m feeling,” and 54% said Jewish spaces felt safer or more supportive than other spaces. Eight percent said they sought spaces where non-Zionist and anti-Zionist views can be expressed without being labelled antisemitic.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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