What I was thinking...

This is my second article in a series of articles that I'm doing a new website new Jewish thought.  It's 2.52am in the morning and I am about to go to bed but just before I do I've decided to write my second post.  The post am writing is based on three sources one my time at the Weitzman Institute 2004 two a book I read about Israel or in particular Tel Aviv and Jaffa city of oranges and third and last the last Jewish Chronicle from last weekend.

I will start by telling you how it fits into New Jewish Thought, last week in the Jewish Chronicle I read that over 50% of Israelis living in Great Britain did not mix with local Jewish people.  This may not sound that important but their is 50,000 of them in the United Kingdom.  What is more shocking is that I'm not surprised first not surprise the reasons why they've not mixed with the bulk of the community in the United Kingdom secondly I was not surprised at the result.  To understand why it's really happening I really need to refer back to my own personal experience.  I have this friend born in Israel should spent most of her life in South Africa but she spent the last two years living in London.  When she first came to this country she joined was a member of a couple of Jewish organisations here in London.  I saw her just before she returned to South Africa just under a month ago and to my surprise she went from wanting to have more to do with the Jewish community in general to wanting nothing to do with it.  If she was a one-off I would be very surprised I talked about this in my last post but the article in the Jewish Chronicle got me thinking about it even more.  And then I remembered an article I've read in the Jewish News another Jewish paper where a Jewish writers suggested that is the Jewish community here in Great Britain was falling numerically the more of us should move to Israel.  I could not think of all worst idea but I could also not just think of a more out of touch idea of reality than what this man is saying.  In the law we are taught sometimes to read between the lines for example some leaseholds unscrupulous landlords will call licences to remove their tenants when they want to sell their property instead Jewish organisations in the UK which have already said are too small use other ways to stop people becoming for members.  From what I've heard recently many Jewish organisations unfortunately are using this method to hide what they really think about outsiders.  In the article in the Jewish Chronicle the Israelis were saying that every time they tried to get involved with the British Jewish community they could not.  The problem here is that I'm willing to bet it's not just Israelis who are having a bad time of trying to get involved with Britain's Jewish community.  As I read the article in the Jewish News I actually felt fairly sick.  From my time in the Weitzman Institute I knew for a fact that most Israelis strongly believe in the survival of the European Judaism and the last thing they would like to see it would be us all moving to Israel.  In any case these days we live in a more and more globalised world some Israelis see this as a big advantage for a small state in a poor part of the world which just happens to be a first world state.  I read in the Guardian yesterday that there are food shortages in Egypt and it hit the point even stronger than before what I had read in city of oranges as it showed just how unstable the middle east was.  In the last chapter of city of oranges they talk about the Russian Jewish immigrants and how some of them are taking drugs and one of the people they're interviewing is suggesting that immigration into Israel should be reduced.  You may ask how does this have anything to do with our community and with the other facts have written on this article so far.  But actually it's got an awful lot to do with what I've written about so far many Jewish organisations including the organisation my friend couldn't seem to join.  Same of the organisations that seem to be the worst offenders are trying to help people in Israel but if you actually meet the people running the organisation's what you tend to find middle-class British-born public school educated Jewish people.  This was what in the end forced my friend to leave the organisation she had in fact joined.  When I was younger 10 years ago I too was a member of the Jewish organisation a youth movement unlike the other people I knew in the youth movement and went to a comprehensive which was also non-Jewish.  I soon found myself that I could mix with the other members as they had all known one another from the age of 10.  I was a 16-year-old and I found myself in a community which claimed I was a member but which none of the people who were there are really saw me as a member.  The result in years according to a few friends in line (I don't know if a certain if this is true or not disclaimer) that the UK Jewish community is known to have the highest levels of social exclusion of any community in the United Kingdom.  From what I've seen I think it's likely when I was in Israel I was the only British Jew studying at the Weitzman Institute. I spoke to the Israelis who was studying at the Weitzman Institute and had lived in Great Britain virtue all of them had been upset by how community treated them.  If you told me they liked individual British Jews but they couldn't stand as a community.  The result has been and again I don't have any proof that some Israeli institutions do not allow European Jewish people to work in their facilities.  The prevailing view tends to be that we are seen as unsociable all these are symptoms of how we see ourselves today and have deep divisions.  It's not only how we treat each other but also how we treat newcomers I've experienced at first hand.  So how can we stop this happening?  I would suggest more community projects but I think the projects need to be not run by people from inside the community unfortunately.  I've read about small American communities building campuses where they share the upkeep of elderly people but the solution to the problems with the British Jewish community I think would need to go more deeper.  We need to change how they see the world and we need to open their eyes, in my last blog I talked about the growing Orthodox community.  After that first blog I started thinking of my grandmother's family they came from Holland.  My great-grandfather when he came over to Britain in 1870 met a nice Sephardic Dutch woman (my great great grandmother).  They fell in love and got married but I was always told that her family disapproved of him marrying her.  The reason for this was many of the Dutch Sephardic disliked the Ashkenazi immigrants.  In Holland itself the division was even worse between the two communities today in Britain's Jewish community with seeing I believe the late stages of a situation like that in Holland.  We have a large minority that is dictating increasingly to the majority on its own terms the sort of community it wants to see. I think the focus of nutritious salt should be to stop this from happening.