By Rabbi Michael Joseph 

It has recently been my great privilege and pleasure to be shown around Israel for two weeks by my 20-year–old daughter, Edie, who is interning this summer at IRAC. This is just a few summers after my wife and I first showed Edie and her brother around Israel on their very first visit. The difference is that on that previous trip, we showed our children the tourist sites -- the Kotel, Masada, the Tel Aviv beachfront. This time, thanks to Edie and thanks to IRAC, I was shown the real Israel, a much more interesting and exciting place, and even more deserving than the "tourist's Israel" of our pride and interest and support.

By Rabbi Danny Allen

It may well be true that 90% of life is showing up. ARZA has been showing up at the World Zionist Congresses every four years for three decades. This congress was led by the incoming President of the Israel Progressive Movement (IMPJ) Yaron Shavit, a first for our movement.

Our accomplishments through the resolutions process partially include:

1. Overwhelming support to oppose the currently proposed changes in Israeli conversion law that will both negate the Law of Return and prejudice the rights of Jewish communities to act, each in its own way, regarding the conversion process.

2. Equal funding for all Jewish religious streams within the WZO budget. This could mean an additional $500,000 for the IMPJ.

3. 80% positive support stating that the Government of Israel should recognize all streams of Judaism and their right to perform marriages and conversion in Israel.

4. Approved a new requirement that 30% of the membership in all WZO committees, boards, etc. must be women.

By Rabbi Adam Rosenwasser 

I want to tell you about a woman I admire.  Her name is Noa.  I met Noa for the first time last fall, at a local gathering to garner support and raise awareness of IGY, an acronym for Israeli Gay Youth, an organization which was founded eight years ago in Tel Aviv to address the needs of Israel’s gay and lesbian teenagers.  Noa has served the organization in many capacities.  She is a leader, an advocate, and a trusted advisor for Israeli teens struggling with their identity.  And Noa was also the first person to arrive at Tel Aviv’s gay and lesbian center on the evening of August 1st, 2009, just a few minutes after a masked gunman had walked into an IGY meeting and shot and killed three young people.  This horrific tragedy is what prompted Noa and her coworkers to travel to the United States, meeting with local LGBT and Jewish leaders.  While I spent time with Noa, I was struck by her bravery, her tenacity, and her belief that Israeli society, though fractured, could rise above its current conflicts to find peace both beyond its borders and within. 

So you can imagine my shock and horror when I read that Noa had been brutally attacked on May 11th at the central bus station in Beer Sheva as she was waiting to board a bus to take her to Tel Aviv.  Noa’s crime?  She had been laying tefilin earlier that morning, privately.  If you have put on tefilin before, you know that they can leave marks as you wrap the leather straps tightly around arm and head.  According to the Jewish telegraphic agency, Noa was approached by an ultra-Orthodox man, who asked her twice if the imprints on her arm were from tefilin.  When she told him they were, he began to kick and strangle her while screaming, “Women are an abomination.”  Miraculously, Noa was able to break free from the man and boarded the bus.

By James Martin

I interviewed Dr Tzvia Greenfield a few months ago when she visited London as a guest of the New Israel Fund. My impression of her was that she is a warm, engaging personality, with a great empathy and desire for social justice and egalitarian issues.

The first Haredi female to be elected to the Knesset,  she is a fierce critic of her own community’s attitudes to the peace process and modernity; describing the Haredi community as being “incapable of compromise”. Yet she still lives in it, a resident of the Jerusalem suburb of Har Nof.

Elected on behalf of Meretz in 2008 as a self-proclaimed egalitarian, she’s in favour of women rabbis and religious pluralism and feels compelled to channel change in her own back-yard, despite disillusionment about the trenchant positions  both of the social  and religious right.
 
During our interview she spoke candidly about her prospects of influencing change but was  also  unsure that  Israel’s left can be revived, uncertain   they can “awake secular Israel from its slumber"-

Her basic philosophy can be summed as thus: “ One neighbour cannot impinge on the other’s rights;  when a community grows, it doesn’t mean the whole community is governed by its rules.”

By Rabbi Stanley Davids 

Resa and I just returned from a most incredible experience – a safari in the Serengeti.  For us, this was a trip of a lifetime – a gift to us from our children to celebrate our 70th birthdays (though I hasten to add that Resa’s 70th will not occur until June of 2011!)  We actually spent part of a day hunting with Click-speaking Bushmen; we encountered an astonishing array of animals and birds, upfront and personal.  We saw life at its most raw – the Bushmen with bow and arrow killing a squirrel – and then consuming it as if it were a gourmet dish; a mother cheetah and her adolescent cubs bringing down a yearling gazelle, within the space of 15 minutes utterly consuming it, bones and all – and then calmly licking the blood off of each other’s fur.  We saw a hyena proudly carrying a zebra leg to a den where cubs awaited, and we saw vultures and storks reducing carrion to mere bones.  We saw a day-old gazelle huddled motionless in the grass, knowing without learning that in the first hours of vulnerability, invisibility is required if survival is to be achieved.  And we saw the indescribable migration of the wildebeest.

The prey and the predators.  Beauty beyond description.  Life without interpretive barriers or Disneyesque fabrications.  An eco-system that works – so that while a zero-sum game is played out at one level, at another level life is sustained to the benefit of all.

I returned to Jerusalem to plunge head-long into the final preparations for the World Zionist Congress, the ARZENU symposium that will precede it and the Jewish Agency Assembly and Board of Governors meetings that will follow – all told, events running from June 11-24.  The politics of Israel, and especially of the Zionist world, can seem agonizingly similar to life on the Serengeti – so much is seen here as a zero-sum game, where some must win and some must lose.  The major question remains: does the eco-system itself work, creating a situation in which the future of the Jewish people across the world and the future of Israel as a Jewish democratic state can be sustained to the benefit of all?  The answer is not at all clear.

By Rabbi Stanley Davids

Resa and I returned home to Jerusalem on January 25th.  We plunged immediately into what has become a month long period of programs, meetings, encounters and conference calls.  We aren't complaining.  It's just that the days aren't long enough.

First up was Resa's challenge to organize a national meeting of the 15 chapters of Women of Reform Judaism - Israel for February 14th.  The national meeting just happened to have been scheduled in the midst of rising concern over events regarding the Women of the Wall.  By now we all know of Nofrat Frenkel who was arrested while worshipping with WOW in November at the Kotel on Rosh Hodesh.  That event set off a tsunami of anguished responses throughout the Diaspora, as Reform and Conservative Jews expressed outrage at what clearly has become a series of escalating restrictions aimed at accommodating the ultra-Orthodox at the expense of just about everyone else.

What kinds of restrictions?  Women cannot wear Tallitot at the Kotel; there is now a 'men only' walkway at the rear of the Western Wall Plaza; some bus routes in Jerusalem have been proclaimed 'women in the back of the bus' routes; some Haredi air passengers are demanding the right to wear portable Mechitzahs (barriers) over their heads while they are flying so that the sight of women won't distract them and so that they will not see the projected movies; and in some areas of Jerusalem Haredim have gender-segregated sidewalks.  Nofrat Frenkel's arrest for many was simply the last straw.

By Rabbi Eric Yoffie

I am saddened and dismayed by recent events at the Western Wall. These events are a tragedy — a blow to the State of Israel and to the unity of the Jewish people.

Love of Israel unites Jews everywhere. Love of Jerusalem unites Jews everywhere. For many of these Jews, the single most important symbol of both Israel and Jerusalem is the Western Wall.

Why turn that symbol into a source of division? Why should the Wall be an ultra-Orthodox synagogue rather than a place that belongs to us all — a place where all Jews can find space to pray, to gather, and to celebrate the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people?

Twenty years ago I proposed a solution to the problem of access to the Wall, and it remains the best answer.

By Rabbi Fred Morgan

Recently, we at Temple Beth Israel celebrated the bat-mitzvah of a girl who attends Leibler-Yavneh College, a religious Zionist school.    Her bat-mitzvah was a living example of what has come to be known as ‘pluralism’ within the Jewish world. 
 
Pluralism is one of three approaches to the religious reality of diversity.  It is a self-evident fact that the Jewish world today is a world of diversity.  Pluralism is one such response: it claims that “there is more than one way to be Jewish.”  The other two responses are the exclusivist and inclusivist approaches.  Both claim there is only one way to be Jewish - the halakhic way -  but differ in their attitude toward Jews who do not subscribe to that way of being Jewish.

By Miriam Farber

8th grade: On my first trip to Israel, with my grandparents' synagogue, we visited the Kotel on Shabbat. I started to write a note to stick in between the stones, and a security guard came over and told me to stop writing.
11th grade: When I was in Israel for a semester in high school on EIE (Eisendrath International Exchange), we went to the Kotel for our first Shabbat in Israel. I wore a kippah, even though my classmates and teacher told me it wasn't a good idea. I looked through the bookshelves in the women's section for a prayerbook that was "mine," and another woman handed me an Artscroll siddur.

On subsequent trips to the Kotel - the Western Wall, the remains of the 2nd Temple closest to its holiest spot, the Holy of Holies - I felt bored, squished, frustrated, and unspiritual (for an example, read my post after being at the Kotel in September.) For years I had heard of the prayer group Women of the Wall, a women's group that prays on the women's side of the Kotel every Rosh Hodesh (the beginning of the Hebrew month). They have a long and contentious history, with Supreme Court battles, discrimination, and harassment, but I was excited to finally have the opportunity to join them in prayer and pray at the Kotel in a way that felt authentic to who am I as a Jew.

Last Rosh Hodesh, I woke up early and shared cabs with some other students from Pardes to the Kotel, where we joined with Women of the Wall and a group of women from Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in NYC. My friends and fellow students Lauren and Evelyn led services. For the first time ever, I wore a tallit at the Kotel. I was scared; I had heard many stories about rocks, heckling from men and women who were offended by what they saw as a desecration of their holy site, even physical assaults, but I felt safe surrounded by this community of women. Singing Hallel, songs of praise, out loud at the Kotel was incredibly powerful. One line in particular resonated with me: לא המתים יהללו יה, ולא כל ירדי דומה, ואנחנו נברך יה מעתה ועד עולם. הללויה The dead will not praise Yah, nor can those who go down into silence. But WE shall praise Yah, now and forever. Halleluyah! (Psalm 115: 17-18) I felt like I was really, genuinely praying at the Kotel, for the first time in a very long time.