A Strategy to Stop Assimilation
by Rabbi Yisroel Roll
From the age of 5 , Iqbal Masih, worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, in a carpet factory in Pakistan. At age 10, Iqbal escaped and began speaking out against child labour abuse. He was murdered at the age of 12 in April, 1995.
In Canada, twelve year old, Craig Kielburger, read about Iqbal and organized an awareness campaign about child labour abuse. He was concerned about the 246 million child labourers and the 73 million of whom who are under 10 years old. He named the group Free the Children. It made international news. Craig is now 27. There are now Free the Children offices in 35 countries and 1 million people have been participated in its projects. Craig said: “We had the daunting task of breaking down the barrier of belief that children are incapable of being key agents of positive social change. We were often seen as idealistic; dreamers who could not translate words into action.”
My meetings with enthusiastic Jewish students and young adults on my lecture tour in London in May, 2011, and the unfolding of recent tumultuous world events, have convinced me that we have a window of opportunity to prod the Third Commonwealth of Israel into becoming a reality. How? With a pro-active campaign of mainstreaming Jewish youth into leadership roles in the community.
Many youth are disaffected and are marrying out-so let’s ask those young people who are involved and actively engaged in Jewish communal life how to bring their friends back into the fold. And we can only do that if we bring young, active Jewish leaders to us-- and give them a voice in our synagogues, institutions and organizations.
That is why I am proposing the creation of a Jewish Youth Commission which will be given the mandate to engage and involve Jewish youth, students and young adults to play a more significant and leading role in Anglo-Jewry, as follows:
1. Placing Youth on Synagogue and Organizations’ Boards of Management. We need to groom and cultivate young Jewish minds to get involved with and to contribute to communal Jewish life. I propose placing two Sixth Form students, one male and one female, in non-voting roles, as well as two college students, one male and one female, in voting roles, on every synagogue Board of Management and every organization’s Board of Directors. This includes the Chief Rabbi’s Cabinet. I also suggest that we create ten student intern positions to serve as observers on the Board of Jewish Deputies.
2.Create a Jewish Youth Council. Let us invite three representatives from every Jewish Youth organization to meet monthly with the Chief Rabbi to discuss Jewish youth issues and to plan cross-community events for Jewish youth including outings, discussions, films and chesed projects. The community wide events would be modeled after the Teen Encounter Events which I organized as part of the Encounter Conferences. This council would also have a University Student Council to advise the Chief Rabbi on campus political events as they relate to anti-Semitism, the State of Israel and assimilation. We should establish annual Jewish Youth Awards to recognize the achievements of individual students and young adults in their contributions to their own organizations and the wider community.
3. Singles Programmes under the auspices of the Office of the Chief Rabbi. This will include cocktail parties at the home of the Chief Rabbi who will host various guest speakers and allow single s to meet and to share ideas. A Singles Committee would meet regularly with the Chief Rabbi to discuss ways of engaging singles in communal life.
We all agree that assimilation is the most pressing issue facing our community. Intermarriage in the UK has increased from 35% in 1990, to 50% in 2010. In my discussions with UK campus outreach workers and educators 7 out of 10 Jewish university students are dating non-Jews. We cannot wait for the students and young adults to come to us. We have to engage them and bring them into our homes, synagogues and organizations. We have to empower them and ask for their input, opinion and contribution to Jewish life. In short, we need to show them, not just tell them, that they are important, crucial to the Jewish community.
We send our eighteen year olds to the front to fight our wars. University students are those who idealistically press for change on university campuses. It is young people who are effecting change toward democracy in the Middle East. We would do well to harness the energy and idealism of our own youth and channel their energies toward community involvement guided by our wisdom and experience. It is time to focus on “in-reach” to engage Anglo-Jewry in the process of re-inspiring itself.
Rabbi Yisroel Roll served as the Rabbi of the New West End Synagogue from 1991-1997, was the founding Rabbi of the Netzach Yisrael Synagogue in Edgware from 1997-2000 and is currently a lawyer, mediator and psychotherapist living with his family in Baltimore, USA. Rabbi Roll can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.