As Israel marks its 60th anniversary, Israelis this year are happy but sober.
That we made it to 60 is itself a wonder. When one recalls the reality of 1948 and the country we are today, it is nothing short of a miracle.
Yet, in many ways Israel at 60 years old is again on another threshold of that long struggle, journey and challenge which is the Jewish state.
In the last years, it seems as if our enemies are becoming daily more bent on our destruction.
We are also at a threshold in the socio-economic dynamic within Israeli society. Today, Israel is part of the global economic village; and the inevitable transformation that took place in the last decade to bring this about left many Israelis behind.
We are at a threshold, too, in our relations with world Jewry as the next generation of both Israelis and North American Jews is coming of age.
On both sides of the ocean our children are more detached, individualistic, anti-establishment. At the same time, they posses a raw idealism, even if it is wrapped in the cloak of non-conformity.
The Israeli landscape indeed looks very different. The computer has replaced the farm; the software program has replaced the Jaffa orange.
But the challenge is still there. We need more computers, just as in the 1950s we needed more farming equipment.
Risk and opportunity
Today the Jewish Agency no longer establishes hundreds of kibbutzim as it did in the 1950s. Instead we have the ground-breaking Net@ program in conjunction with Cisco computer systems, to certify high school students in periphery towns with a computer technician certificate by the time they graduate high school.
And if we aren’t establishing a kibbutz in the Galilee, we are helping small and medium businesses secure the loans they need to grow and make economic life in Israel’s north more sustained and viable.
The Jewish Agency’s Youth Aliyah villages, which began in the 1930s by providing safe haven for Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany, today provide homes for youth at risk, both immigrants and natives.
Clearly over the years, the definition of “at-risk” has changed, but the nurturing environment for the 300,000 children that have spent time at one of the villages in the last 70 years is very much a constant over time.
With the change in landscape, the change in challenge, the threshold of new times, we are on the cusp of both great risk and great opportunity.
One of the fundamentals that sustained us in the last 60 years and must sustain us in the 60 years to come is our partnership as a Jewish people.
When we in Israel hurt, every Jew across the world hurts. When rockets fell in the north during the war, Jews the world over offered assistance.
And we came to their assistance by upgrading shelters with air conditioning and television sets and brought youth from the whole area to camps out of the range of fire.
When rockets fall in the Sderot area — as they do day in and day out — the Jews of North America are there by providing for every household whose home was hit by a rocket and by taking Sderot’s youngsters to camps outside of the area of attack for a Passover holiday.
In the coming year Israel may continue to hurt, and we are certain of the unflinching bond of Jews everywhere — to stand in solidarity and to assist as much as possible.
But that bond goes beyond crisis — and it is a reciprocal bond and partnership. It goes to the 50 partnerships between communities in Israel and communities in North America and Europe which have been running for over a decade — where countless people-to-people bonds have been formed across the ocean.
And the bond goes to the next generation having the experience of spending a formative year of study or work in Israel.
Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a stalwart of the unity of the Jewish people, launched MASA with the Jewish Agency four years ago. Today it is our flagship education program because he believed, as we do, that the future leaders of world Jewry must spend a formative year in Israel.
And for every dollar we contribute to the effort of encouraging teens and young adults to spend time studying, interning or volunteering in Israel, the State of Israel puts in a dollar — because the government recognized that it is an Israeli national interest to have young Jews from abroad spending significant time in Israel.
To this end as well, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently set up a group to include leading Israelis, the Jewish Agency and representatives of world Jewry to discuss ways to strengthen the bond between Jews in Israel and abroad, focusing on the next generation.
This is at the heart of the work we have been doing for more than 80 years, as the representative body of the Jews before the state of Israel was established, and, after 1948, as the bridge between world Jewry and the Zionist enterprise here in Israel, a partnership we will be celebrating when the Jewish Agency receives the Israel Prize on Independence Day.
In this time of challenge and opportunity we must work to solidify further and strengthen our great strategic assets — our bond as the Jewish people.
If we accomplished as much as we did in the last 60 years, imagine, with a redoubled effort, what we can do in another 60 years.
Zeev Bielski is chair of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Loading ...