The most talked about issue in the American Jewish community right now is the Pew Study. This hot topic will be discussed at 7 p.m. next Wednesday night, Oct. 30, at the Jewish Community Campus. The event, “A Portrait of Jewish Americans: Is the Sky Falling?” is sponsored by the Jewish Federation, the Rabbinical Association, and the Jewish Funders Council (Jewish Community Foundation, Jewish Federation, Jewish Heritage Foundation, Menorah Legacy Foundation).
The panel discussion, being tabbed as a community conversation, will be moderated by Andrew Kaplan, the immediate past president of The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah. The panel will consist of three rabbis: Rabbi Doug Alpert (Congregation Kol Ami), Rabbi David Glickman (Congregation Beth Shalom) and Rabbi Daniel Rockoff (BIAV); two agency executives: Jay Lewis, executive director of KU Hillel, and Jacob Schreiber, president and CEO of the Jewish Community Center; and community volunteers Sarah Beren and Victor Wishna.
Alan Edelman, associate executive director of the Jewish Federation, said the panelists are “next gen or new to the world of Jewish communal professional service,” because they are the ones who will deal with how the Jewish community will need to address these issues in the future.
Kaplan will make some introductory remarks before the panelists each speak for approximately five minutes. Following formal remarks, the audience will have a chance to join the discussion. The evening is scheduled to end at 9 p.m.
Edelman said the event was planned because this survey has caused a lot of buzz.
“We’ve been getting lots of calls and the bottom line is people want to talk about the issues and share ideas,” he said.
Even before the survey results became public, Edelman said Jewish professionals and lay leaders were following trends that were telling them they needed to come up with different ways to engage members of the Jewish community.
One such example is the number of people, 97 percent, who say they are proud to be Jewish and want to associate with Jews.
“As Steven Cohen said in a webinar I participated in, more people are attending events like Jewish film festivals than are sitting in synagogue,” Edelman reported.
Another trend Edelman referred to is that the number of children attending Jewish preschools is on the rise, yet the number of children being enrolled in synagogue religious schools — in kindergarten, first and second grades in particular — is declining.
“It’s time to respond to these trends,” he said.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Edelman said, has characterized the situation in which the Jewish community is finding itself in an interesting way.
“He said the first 2,000 years of Jewish history were biblical. The second 2,000 years were rabbinic. We’re now entering the third 2,000 years,” he said.
“We’ll have to see what kind of radical changes we’ll need to make now,” Edelman added.
For more information about the Pew study, the findings can be found at http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/.