Orbit April 2012 - Plainview Jewish Center

ORBIT
Page 24
Israel Affairs by Sharon Kunoff
It is hard to believe that it is time for the April column. So, first, I hope you all enjoyed a festive
Purim with your families at the PJC and are now all ready for Pesach. With all the educational activities
at PJC: the Sisterhood Women’s Seder in March, the Model Seders and studies your Religious school
students attended, and information gleaned at other study sessions there should be very interesting
discussions around the many Seder tables in the Plainview-Old Bethpage area this year. If when you are
reading this you find you will be alone this year, please let someone at PJC know. A place will be found
for you at one of the local tables !! Hag Pesach Sameah.
Noah and I completed a 3+ week road trip to Florida to visit friends and family, with various stops
along the way, returning home with the deadline for this article looming. Fortunately, The New Israel
Fund, one of the Israeli organizations that we support had taken a closer look at the Guttman Center
Survey I mentioned last month, and came up with some interesting facts that did not appear in the general
media. The first headline that intrigued me in the New Israel Fund newsletter was: Can you believe it?
Israel has more Conservative and Reform Jews than Haredis? Of course I was very happy to hear this.
And I realized that this is another case of the squeaky wheel getting the attention. They certainly make a
lot of noise with stoning people who they feel are not observing Shabbat properly, beating up women
who put on Tefillin, boxing in the Women’s area on the wall so that it is amazing that air can penetrate,
and trying to enforce the rule that was found unconstitutional by the Israeli Supreme court, relegating
women to the back of the bus.
According to statistics from the Guttman Center as reported by Rabbi Schmuel on
JewishJournal.com, Question number 157 asked: “How would you define yourself religiously?” and the
options were: Haredi, Haredi-Leumi (Zionist ultra-Orthodox), Dati-Leumi (Zionist-Orthodox), Conservative,
Reform, Other, Do not belong to any stream. This question was not included in the final report but the raw
data for all questions in now available on line and Rabbi Rosner found the answers to this one worth
reporting. It turns out that half of Israelis (50 percent) do not belong to any stream. These are the more
than 40 percent of the self-defined “secular” and probably some “traditional” Israelis as well. The surprising
number is the combined number of “liberal” religious Israelis: 8 percent. Haredi,7%: Haredi-Leumi, 2%:
Dati-Leumi, 22%: Conservative, 4%: Reform, 4: Other,12: No stream, 50: Total, 100%
Rabbi Rosner then pondered what this really means or can mean to the non Orthodox groups, the
Masorti (conservative) and the Reform. He compared data with the last time such a survey was done
and found the number of Masorti and Reform has increased. The question was worded somewhat
differently then, but it is most likely that the number has really grown. While still small, the percent has
almost doubled. Independent information also leads to that conclusion as the number of Israeli Masorti
congregations has increased from about 40 to 60 in the last 5 years. The congregations aren’t large, but
in Tel Aviv and Herzeliya on Shabbat mornings 2 years ago, we attended morning services of over 20
people each, in Herzeliya the Shabbat before Pesach and in Tel Aviv, during Pesach and also on the
final day of the holiday. The main Masorti shul in Jerusalem on the first day of Pesach had many more
attendees but it caters to tourists, the others are neighborhood congregations.
One comment Rabbi Rosner noted after speaking to Professor Tamar Hermann, the academic
supervisor of the Guttman Center, was that she believes that many of the Israelis who defined themselves
as “Conservative” and “Reform” were really “Israelis with strong religious sense that do not see themselves
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