FOR YOUNG EUROPEANS DISCOVERING THEIR ROOTS, JEWISHNESS IS ABOUT CULTURE

Jewish Exponent
Sept 3 2009

Participants in Paideia’s project-incubator meeting in Stockholm with
Beto Maya (left), the project manager for the Jerusalem-based ROI,
a program to foster Jewish innovation

A lapsed Polish Catholic cites the "Jewish sparks in his 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.

Emerging From the Shadows

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, 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. 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,
Paideia’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, 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,"
said Spectre. "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 developed his identity, Kenesei says that 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, he is working to establish an Israeli cultural center in
Budapest.

"I felt this 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," he 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 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 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.

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," explained Mirski. "My main goal is to build bridges
between people."

His 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 recently ended.

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."If you mean by culture the way a European would define it —
being literate — if we’re talking about forming communities of
learning, I would claim that’s the sustainable element in Judaism."