FOR YOUNG EUROPEANS DISCOVERING ROOTS, JEWISHNESS IS ABOUT CULTURE, NOT RELIGION
By Ben Harris

Jewish Telegraphic Agency
August 18, 2009

Participants in Paideia’s project-incubator meeting in Stockholm
in August 2009 with Beto Maya, left, the project manager for the
Jerusalem-based ROI, a program to foster Jewish innovation. (Paideia
)STOCKHOLM (JTA) — A lapsed Polish Catholic cites the "Jewish sparks
in my soul" when explaining his affinity for klezmer and his desire
to foster intercultural exchange through Jewish music.

A 25-year-old Hungarian born to intermarried parents and working to
create an Israeli cultural center in Budapest says he would not be
crushed if his children decide not to engage in Jewish life.

An Armenian Christian wants to start a Judaic studies seminar at an
Armenian university that would highlight shared elements of Armenian
and Jewish history.

A German Jewish journalist who became interested in Judaism through
an ex-girlfriend aims to start an Internet show focusing on the weekly
Torah portion and Israeli culture.

Welcome to the emerging Jewish Europe, where Jewish consciousness
is rising — among Jews and gentiles alike — amid some of the most
secular societies in the world.

At a time when religious identity in Europe is at historic lows —
in Sweden, only about 3 percent of citizens attend church regularly –
once-assimilated Jews are emerging from the shadows and seeking to
reassert their Jewish identities.

The trend has been in evidence in Central and Eastern Europe since the
fall of communism 20 years ago paved the way for many to rediscover
Jewish roots. But even in Western Europe, the emergence of the European
Union coupled with the growing diversity of the region’s population has
prompted a reassertion of national identities, including among Jews.

"With that sort of multiculturalism, and I think with the united
Europe, your roots become more important," said Gabriel Urwitz, a
leader of the Stockholm Jewish community and the chairman of Paideia,
an academic institute in Stockholm working to promote Jewish culture
across Europe.

"So even people that three generations ago were Jewish and knew about
it, until quite recently they never said a word about it," Urwitz
said. "Now all of a sudden they feel they can somehow search that
root and to some extent promote it and find their own way into it."

The reclaiming of European Jewish identity — Barbara Spectre,
Paedeia’s founding director, calls it "dis-assimilation" — is on the
march. But rather than taking on religious forms, dis-assimilation
among young Europeans often has a distinctly secular quality.

Many young Europeans embracing Jewish culture come from small
communities where established Jewish institutions range from weak to
nonexistent, the opportunities for Jewish religious community are
minimal and the likelihood that they will marry within the faith
is low.

"They don’t have those components and yet they choose to be Jewish,"
Spectre said. "The question is, of course, why would one do this? It’s
a tremendously important question. And I think that they can act as
sort of informants to us, the rest of the Jewish world."

Jews who fit this profile make up a majority of applicants to Paideia’s
flagship program, a one-year fellowship in Jewish texts that aims
not only to immerse students in the literature of the Jewish people,
but to prime them for activist roles in promoting Jewish life across
Europe. The institute also runs a 10-day project incubator over the
summer, supported by the European Jewish Fund and UJA-Federation
of New York, which offers training and networking opportunities to
social entrepreneurs with projects to invigorate Jewish culture.

Paideia receives six times as many applicants for the fellowship
as it accepts, most of them from individuals who were not raised as
identified Jews. Some aren’t Jewish at all but are welcomed because
they have demonstrated a commitment to advancing Jewish culture.

Marcell Kenesei from Budapest completed both programs. A self-described
secular Jew, Kenesei was born to a Jewish father who knew nothing
about his heritage. Kenesei, whose mother is not Jewish, was sent
to a Jewish high school to avoid the anti-Semitic harassment his
older brother had endured in Hungarian public school. As a result,
Kenesei grew interested in Judaism.

As he "came out" as Jewish, Kenesei says, he found he had to overcome
the sense that reclaiming Judaism was a "sickness" and the province of
"losers" unable to find their place in post-Communist Hungary. Today
Kenesei is working to establish an Israeli cultural center in Budapest.

"I felt this huge gap in the family that we have this Jewish thing but
nobody knows anything about it, so it was sort of a mission for me to
discover this part of the family and bring things back," Kenesei said.

Paideia, formed in 2001, is the product of a commission formed by the
Swedish government in the 1990s to investigate the country’s role
during the Holocaust. Though the commission ultimately determined
that Sweden bore little legal responsibility for the loss of Jewish
property, the government opened discussions with the Stockholm Jewish
community to find a way to make some sort of moral restitution.

The result was Paideia, whose name comes from the Greek concept that
culture can be transmitted through education rather than bloodline. It
was a notion appealing to a Swedish government then at the forefront
of efforts to transmute dozens of national identities into a single
pan-European union.

But it also has particular implications for Jews living in a place
steeped in secularism, increasingly cosmopolitan and heterogeneous,
and after the tribulations of the last century, often unable to trace
their ethnic origins along purely Jewish lines.

Paideia believes that participants committed to Jewish culture
can acquire a post-ethnic Jewish identity through study rather than
conversion. That’s why the fellowship is open to non-Jews interested in
Jewish life who demonstrate a commitment to promoting Jewish culture.

Piotr Mirski, who completed the fellowship program this year, is a
klezmer guitarist from Lublin, a Polish city whose population once was
40 percent Jewish. Though not Jewish himself — Mirski was raised as
a Polish Catholic, but left the Church — the experience of separation
from his homeland’s dominant religious group offers some insight into
the experience of Polish Jewry, he says.

"I realized that I shared somehow the experience of Jewish people
in Poland, and it drives me to make something against it, against
exclusion," Mirski told JTA. "My main goal is to build bridges
between people."

Mirski’s project, which he calls Jazz Midrash-The Hebrew Songbook,
aims to produce two CDs, including one with original Polish-language
songs based on Jewish stories. Mirski wants to promote the book and
CDs with a series of street festivals in Polish towns that once were
centers of Jewish life.

While some are skeptical that Jewish culture absent any religious
component is sufficient to sustain Jewish identity across the
generations, Paideia participants insist it is.

"Culture and history is much stickier glue in Europe than it is in the
United States," said Shawn Landres, an American who staffed Paideia’s
recent incubator program, which ended last week.

Still, Spectre acknowledges that sometimes she wonders whether cultural
projects will be enough to sustain Jewish identity in the long run.

"A nonethnic definition of Judaism changes the whole dynamic," she
said. But, "if you mean by culture the way a European would define
it — being literate," she said, "if we’re talking about forming
communities of learning — I would claim that that’s the sustainable
element in Judaism."

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress