It is a long physical journey from Madison to Ashkelon and Jerusalem and from there to Stockholm. But the Jewish journey behind the changing panorama has been stranger still.
My mother, z”l, arrived in the United States from Poland in 1914 when she was 7. For her, Milwaukee and subsequently Madison, the city where she and my father raised their family, were indeed the incarnation of the Promised Land.
Much later, when my mother was living with us in Jerusalem, I told her that I would be traveling to the land of her birth. She looked at me in combined fear and disbelief, and said, “Don’t go there!”
That was 15 years ago. I was making the “Jewish trip to Europe.” I was to visit the death camps of destruction. My mother was right, and her words haunted me as I made the death pilgrimage.
In her mind, the Jews have two promised lands: the one she came to as a child, and the one to which I had taken her when my husband and I made aliyah. These were home; Europe, never.
No one could have known of the other European story that was about to emerge. No one could have known about the grass that was growing under the ashes of destruction.
The forces that would bring about the other story of Europe began to take shape with the end of the communist empire. Together with the fall of the wall, the façade of hidden identities was to fall.
All over Central and Eastern Europe, young people were told — often by their grandparents — of their Jewish roots. Surprisingly, many of those young people then decided to appropriate for themselves this new identity.
Enthusiasm not enough
Intuitively, their decision seems incredible. After all, no one knew them as Jews; they were well aware what non-Jews in Europe felt about Jews.
Further, they had no childhood memories of Jewish rituals and experiences.
Nevertheless, thousands assumed enthusiastically their new identities.
But enthusiasm alone could not be enough to sustain them. Without substantive knowledge of the content of Jewish life, these newly assumed identities would either evaporate or become merely vapid nostalgia.
But in the north of Europe another force was at work — a profound recognition of loss. Six years ago the Swedish government gave a $5 million grant to establish an institute of higher learning to reinvigorate European Jewish life; and $2.5 million followed from the Wallenberg Foundation.
Together, these formed the foundational grants for Paideia-The European Institute for Jewish Studies. Paideia has become, in its five short operational years, an institution that has transformed the enthusiasm of the “unexpected” Jews into substance.
In these past five years, 100 fellows, mostly professionals, have been selected from six-times that number of candidates to undergo a highly intense course in the sources central to Jewish existence, and a finely tuned applied program to prepare them to transform that substance into operative programs in their home countries.
They have become both connoisseurs of Jewish texts and entrepreneurs of Jewish life in Europe. They have surpassed even the highest expectations.
Graduates now function in 22 European countries as Jewish professionals, lay leaders of their communities, and cultural personalities. Some have formed new frameworks, such as the Text Forum now operating in the former Yugoslavia, by which they inject substance into nascent Jewish life.
I now travel often to Poland, as well as to 21 other European countries to interview candidates and to visit the graduates. They live in difficult terrain. Many of the countries harbor strong anti-Israeli sentiments; in many countries there are forceful pockets of anti-Semitism.
But these Paideia graduates are primed to be agents of change, to make a difference. They are only beginning. If only I could tell my mother.
Barbara Lerner Spectre is the founding director of Paideia-The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. She served for many years on the faculties of the Hebrew University, Yellin College for Education, and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. She is the daughter of Sam Lerner, z”l, and Ida Hoffman Lerner, z’l, both longtime residents of Milwaukee and Madison.
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