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The Shekel Before the Storm GA Magazine / 'Like in America' By Nathan Jeffay Tags: Israel news, GA, religion  Full coverage of the 2008 GA conference Until about five years ago, Tel Aviv resident Israel Tal had not stepped foot in a synagogue for three decades. Tal had decided shortly after his father's death that he had had enough of a Judaism he saw as coercive. But then he discovered Kehilat Sinai, a Conservative synagogue in Tel Aviv run by Rabbi Roberto Arbib, who moved here from Rome in 1975. Advertisement "I don't come from a religious background," says Tal. "But I felt that I needed a place to learn about my heritage." "As soon as I found that I could go to a synagogue where I don't have to cover my head, and where nobody will say anything if I walk out halfway through since I have something else to do, I was there with Rabbi Arbib." Congregations the world over may declare the "Torah shall go forth from Zion" when they remove the scroll from the ark, but Israelis are increasingly drawing on Diaspora attitudes toward Judaism - including an emphasis on inclusiveness and community, denominational diversity and user-friendly services - in their practice of religion. Across the country, Conservative congregations have enjoyed increased attendance, many by as much as 40 percent, during the last decade. There are 52 congregations today compared with 40 in the late 1980s, and Israel's Conservative movement is launching a $3.2 million project, headed by Arbib, to open an American-style JCC within two years in Neve Tzedek, one of Tel Aviv's trendiest neighborhoods. Membership in Israel's Reform synagogues, meanwhile, has skyrocketed in the last five years, from 2,000 families then to 5,000 today. The change is even seeping through to the Israeli government, which this spring granted state-funded premises to a Conservative congregation, in Modi'in, for the first time. Four Reform congregations also recently received state funding. Until now, the state had reserved such funds for Orthodox synagogues. Israel's increasing openness to American ideas about religion can be traced to a replacement of the ideological model dictating that Israel should serve as a religious inspiration for the Diaspora, says Professor Samuel Heilman of Queens College, a leading sociologist of Judaism. That concept is being replaced in Israelis' mindset by what Heilman calls the "Jerusalem and Babylon" model, a reference to the Talmudic era, when religious centers in Jerusalem and Babylon exchanged ideas. "Even among the keenest religious Zionists today, the belief in shlilat hagolah [the nullification of the Diaspora] has all but disappeared - meaning there is a certain openness to what [the Diaspora] has to offer," says Heilman. One element of Israeli Judaism that native Israelis are showing signs of rejecting is that here, "you're in or you're out - either religious or non-religious," says Yair Silverman, an Orthodox rabbi setting up an Israeli version of an American community in Zichron Yaakov in the north. In America, by contrast, "it's recognized that Judaism isn't all or nothing - it's more of a smorgasbord." Silverman, a former New York pulpit rabbi, established a Shabbat service earlier this year that meets twice a month and borrows several ideas from the United States: free childcare and children's services to allow mom and dad to pray, a service replete with explanations (in Hebrew), and a 9 A.M. start - at least an hour after most Israeli services begin. Silverman also runs mid-week religious study classes whose participants include 25 families who have rarely attended synagogue before, and a social action program for people interested in neither prayer nor study. "Over the past 60 years, Israel has successfully transformed disparate Jews arriving from dozens of different countries into a national Israeli identity," says Silverman. "The necessary focus on national identity came at the expense of the local communities." Silverman is trying to change that focus. "I'm trying to break down the 'in or out' model," he says. "Judaism offers us 613 very different ways of getting close to God." One of those ways, it appears, is through the environment. As Diaspora Jews try to get the hang of Hebrew so they can understand Jewish texts, Israelis are getting their heads around an odd truth - if they want to read the latest material on what the Torah has to say about the environment, they need to read it in English. "The impetus among Jewish environmentalists comes from the States, as does much of the material," says Carmi Wisemon, an Orthodox rabbi and executive director of the religious environmentalist group Sviva Israel. Wisemon, who immigrated from New York 20 years ago and now edits an Israeli environmental journal with most of the articles in Hebrew, reports that Israelis are slowly beginning to make Jewish environmentalism their own. For American Jews, he says, being a Jewish environmentalist could be as limited as "greening their synagogue." "Here, we've got a whole country and policy which we're responsible for and which we need to implement," says Wisemon. "People from the States ignited the movement and connected Judaism to environmentalism; now it's gathering it is own momentum and developing here." Another aspect of Diaspora-style Judaism that is coming to life in Israel is explanatory services such as those found in beginner services or some non-Orthodox congregations in the United States. This Yom Kippur, some 50,000 people flocked to services organized in community centers across the country for the non-religious public. The Orthodox Tzohar organization, which ran the services, was even asked to organize prayers at some of the county's most secular kibbutzim. "Secular Jews are largely scared to enter their local synagogue," says Rabbi Moshe Beeri, chairman of Tzohar, a group of Orthodox rabbis and educators that aims to improve communication between religious and secular Israelis. Rivka Haze, a resident of Moshav Eshtaol near Beit Shemesh, where 100 secular members attended a Tzohar service on Yom Kippur, says most of the participants wouldn't have come to a regular service. "Going to a synagogue is intimidating since people don't know how to act, when to stand up and sit down," says Haze. "What we had here was very different, and I'm sure if it didn't take place, most of the participants would have just stayed at home." While Tzohar's Yom Kippur services focus on making prayer more accessible to the Israeli public, Arbib is introducing native Israelis to the concept of Jewish community. Arbib says it is the basics of Conservative Judaism that have brought non-religious Tel Avivians (half his congregants define themselves as non-observant) to Kehilat Sinai: the gender equality, the fact that men and women sit together during services, and the availability of adult education classes with no expectation of observance. And it is not just American transplants attending the congregations. While much of the inspiration for Kehilat Sinai comes from the United States, it is by no means an Anglo bubble - 70 percent of congregants are Israeli-born, says Arbib. One Israeli attracted to Arbib's take on Jewish life is popular Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza, who is a member of Kehilat Sinai and made his son's bar mitzvah there three years ago. Over Sukkot this year, Broza played a concert at the site of the new Neve Tzedek center that was organized by Arbib and the Conservative movement's Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies. The Jewish center Arbib is heading will be emphasizing the arts as a way of appealing to non-observant Israelis. The Schechter Center for Jewish Culture will house a cafe, art gallery, kindergarten and rooms for musicians to play, and will run a teacher training program and adult education classes - a combination fairly commonplace in the United States but virtually unheard of in Israel. If the expected 1,000 people a week pass through the doors in Neve Tzedek, the building will be one of Israel's busiest religious centers, an unlikely addition to the uber-cool district. The neighborhood was Tel Aviv's first, built in 1887, and attracts swathes of visitors every weekend who come not in search of Judaism, but to get away from it. Many come from towns where shops and cafes shut down over Shabbat, and head for Neve Tzedek for its quaint cafes. Arbib's answer is to make his center a tourist hub, offering information, walking tours, and of course, prayer services. "What the Conservative movement has managed in recent years shows there is a remarkable thirst for what we have to offer," says Arbib. "Both in our religious approach and what we mean by community - as in not just a synagogue but a full community, like in America." Full coverage of the 2008 GA conference Bookmark to del.icio.us   The King is dead Archeologists find new evidence for King Herod's tomb site. Al-Hasbara Israel launches Arabic YouTube channel to bypass Arab media.

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