| As a past regional director for JNF in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island (the most synagogue intensive area in the US) I was privileged to address perhaps 100 synagogue audiences during my three year tenure. My message was always Jewish identity, Israel awareness and the risk to Jews living in the post-Holocaust Diaspora. My audiences, always enthusiastic, always generous in contributing, were always gray, their average age somewhere above 50. That is the reality of Jewish life in the US Diaspora, at least in the region I served. And while there may be exceptional and younger communities out there, New York City continues the most densely Jewish city in the US. Were my audiences conscious of their Jewish identity, of the major Jewish organizations, of course. But demographics speak for themselves, and if our youth are absent from the foundational and local organization of Jewish identity, how much identification with organizations and leaders more distant from their lives and experien |
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