Don’t underestimate the impact one man can have, or the potential impact of one Israeli’s visit to Wisconsin.
Rabbi Nir Barkin is director of the Israel-Diaspora Department of the Reform Movement in Israel. He’s created 140 partnerships between Israeli Reform leaders and American ones since he started the job eight months ago. The goal is to strengthen the small-but-growing Reform movement in Israel, while also helping American Reform Jews feel connected to the Jewish homeland.
“We would like to break the paradigm which says each community lives for itself,” he said in an interview, by Skype from Israel.
What makes Barkin’s goals and work remarkable is not just that they’re happening, not just that they’re partially funded by the Israeli government, but also that he found his passion for it all in Wisconsin.
Barkin was working in the corporate sector of Israel when in the winter of 1999 he decided to switch to education. He applied to be ashaliach, an Israeli cultural emissary sponsored by the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel Center, and was sent to Milwaukee in August of 1999.
About a year in, he said, “I discovered I’m not only Israeli. I’m also Jewish.”
Israelis, he said, can view Orthodox as the only available kind of Jewish religion. In Wisconsin, Barkin fell for the Reform movement.
“I discovered who I am Jewishly by spending a year in Wisconsin,” he said. “That was a big discovery. We cannot underestimate the reveal. This was a direct path to my decision to go to rabbinical school.”
Barkin returned to Israel from Milwaukee in the summer of 2003 and by the end of the year he’d started school at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem, the main Reform seminary. He became a rabbi.
In 2007, Barkin started with an Israeli congregation of 100 families. Eight years later, it had a day school and 1,000 families.
“This is a credit to the Milwaukee Jewish community that training one person … enabled a 1,000-family congregation to rise in a city where it almost had none before,” he said.
In May of 2015, he accepted his current job as first director of a new department of the Reform movement in Israel, called the Israel-Diaspora Department. The Israeli government helps fund his department. Barkin says it is the first-ever partnership between the Reform movement and the government of Israel.
Surveys show diminishing ties to Israel for younger people in the diaspora, he said. His program is considered an antidote. His cross-country partnerships, which include everything from talks to trading information to visits, are really intended to foster something as simple as friendship.
“We would like the progressive communities outside of Israel to feel closer and sympathetic to what’s happening in Israel, when it comes to the progressive movements in Israel,” he said.
There are seven partnership communities in Germany, five in the former Soviet Union, 17 in Europe, and around 80 to 100 partnerships in North America. One such partnership is between Congregation Sinai in Fox Point and Congregation Emet VeShalom in Nahariya, Israel. Its Reform rabbi, Ariella Graetz-Bartuv, is set to visit Milwaukee on March 1. (See story, this issue)
These connections are not just for the benefit of American Jewry.
“We’ve discovered that the Israeli public knows very little about what’s happening in the world Jewish community and particularly what’s happening in progressive communities,” Barkin said. “We want to strengthen North American leaders’ affiliation but also strengthen Israelis’ affiliation to the North American Jewish community and explain to Israelis what it means to be a Jew outside of Israel.”
Then, when you come visit Israel, maybe you’ll have contacts or memories there to connect with.
“None of the 140 partners are allowed to fundraise in this program,” Barkin said. “The point is the friendship.”
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How to help
Rabbi Nir Barkin wants to foster connections between Israel and the Diaspora. He said much of the best programming will come from local American lay leaders, not programming dictated to a community by outsiders. Come up with an idea, something to share with Israeli progressives. Talk with your rabbi, the head of your Israel committee at your synagogue, or the Israel Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. Then, contact can be made through Smadar Bilik at Domim@Reform.org.il.
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