Teen Education for Reform Jews

Can we do Better?

(The following is a letter sent by Rabbi Guttman to the Reform Rabbis and educators list on June 14, 2010.)

As Reform Jews, can we do a better job in preparing our young people to be Jews? In general, we have not been successful in educating our community, especially our teens and college students. I am particularly worried that our teenagers are inadequately prepared for the onslaught on anti-Israel propaganda that they will face on college campuses. All too often, they have very little understanding of the nature of Israel’s security needs

In 2003, the pollster, Frank Luntz, pointed out that young American Jews are feeling a greater distance from Israel, the nation, and its future. Last month, a columnist named Peter Beinert said that in his opinion, the distance felt by young American Jews was due to the fact that as Liberals, they opposed the policies of Israel and that they were specifically turned off by the American Jewish establishment’s support of Israel’s policies.

The new lobby called “J Street” would represent a protest against the pro Israel lobbying of the American Jewish establishment. “J-Street” has been critical of Israel’s policies and supportive of a proscriptive approach to the Middle-East conflict. In J-Street’s view, the Obama administration should “drive” the parties towards a peace settlement. Another way to look at this is that the peace settlement should be enforced from the outside by the Obama administration and the rest of the world upon Israel. When talking to J-Street activists, I’ve heard two statements. One is, “Israel has had sixty years to solve this conflict and has not been able to do so. Therefore the United States needs to do it.” The second statement that I’ve heard is, “We need to save Israel from itself.”

I have several problems with the J Street position. First, I seriously doubt that any imposed settlement will work for either the Palestinians or the Israelis. There must be “buy-in” from both sides. Second, J-Street’s position does not acknowledge the vibrancy or legitimacy of Israel as a representative democracy which should be in control of its own destiny. Finally, I think it is very sad that the emergence of J-Street does not seem to have brought American Jews who disagree with Israel closer to Israel or back to Jewish commitment. Rather it just seems to have provided to them an outlet for criticizing Israel and thereby becoming even more distant from Israel and the state.

In my opinion however, the distancing of young American Jews is not due to Israeli’s policies as much as it is to the abject failure of Jewish education. This past week in a speech to the Union for Reform Judaism Board, President Eric Yoffie wrote that 80% of those children in the who become Bnei Mitzvah in Reform congregations will have no connection to the Temple or synagogue by the time they are in the 12th grade. I have been aware of this statistic for several years, but now that it is publically out there it is indeed shocking.


Here in Greensboro, there are some significant forces counter to this, but we are only one small Jewish community in America. One of them is, of course, the American Hebrew Academy which is a pearl of the Jewish world in that it is succeeding in creating a strong Jewish identity in teens. The dedication to sending kids to Israel is also seen in the fine program at the American Hebrew Academy wherein the 11th grade spends its fall semester of their junior year in Israel.

The second is the dedication of our congregations toward the education of our teens. Last year in addition to taking kids to Israel, Temple Emanuel organized a teen trip to the Religious Action Center in Washington, DC and a “Disaster and Rebuild” trip to New Orleans and a teen trip to Poland and Israel.


The third factor is the generous support of many philanthropists in our community and most especially, the Greensboro Jewish Federation towards making such trips possible.

The results of our effort to educate teens in our community is to be seen in the following statistics. We retained 80% of our recent twelfth grade class after Bnei Mitzvah. In the past few years, we have maintained somewhere between 70-80% of all of the kids who have become a Bnai Mitzvah Three quarters of those we have retained go to Israel before high school graduation. This year, incredibly, 100% of our teens had been to Israel.

I am more convinced of the importance of such trips. By taking kids to Poland and then to Israel, we are indeed giving to our young people a narrative of why there must be a state of Israel as a refuge for our people and a place wherein Jews can be in control of their own destiny.

The Reform movement, being the largest Jewish movement in America, contains a million and a half Jews and almost a thousand congregations. I have no idea how many kids become Bnai Mitzvah during the year, but for 80% of them not to be connected 5 years later is indeed appalling! This statistical phenomenon is a threat to the future viability of the Reform movement. It is THE major reason why so many non-orthodox Jewish kids are not well prepared to encounter pro-Palestinian propaganda on college campuses. It affects the future viability of the future Jewish-American community, including the Jewish Federation movement.

Friends, we can do better! We can do better in presenting Israel’s case for the world. We can do better in terms of educating our young people to defend Israel from propaganda which seeks to delegitimize her right to exist. We can do better when it comes to turning our Bnei Mitzvah factories with their appalling dropout rates into real schools wherein students remain engaged throughout high school. We can do much better when it comes to educating our young people to love the Jewish people, the State of Israel and Torah. We can do better!