(BLOG) The Lost Jews And The Jews Of Death

"By Rabbi Zvi: I spent yesterday afternoon with a lovely mother and daughter who live not far from Reading. They have always known that they are Jewish but have never actively participated in the Jewish community. No Mezuzzah on the door, just faint memories of the food. I offered a mezuzah and they both accepted with some delight and a few tears.

There must be thousands such people in Britain, but with the continuing ghettoization of the community into North London and Manchester, fewer Jews will be around to find the lost members of our community. Nobody is really actively seeking these people out - nobody has really made it their mission to find the unattached members of our community and re-attach them, sew on the partially severed limbs of the body of our Jewish community.



It's not as if they don't want us to help them back. They have been assumed to want no more to do with Judaism. Yet almost every unattached Jew I have ever met - even those who never even knew they were Jewish - wants to get closer to their wider Jewish family, the community, and their heritage. We are for the most part failing them by not making a concerted effort to serve them. We have Elkan Levy and the Office of the Small Communities, and of course Malcolm Weismann did a very special job for all those years and continues so to do. But the outreach organizations miss a whole tranche of Jews all over the country merely because they don't fit their profiles.

Some do attach themselves. They affiliate so that they can be 'buried Jewish'. This is not in itself wrong - it is a perfectly understandable sentiment. Yet how many shuls or shul organizations actually twig that here is a member who may be able to point us towards others who need re-enlisting in the ranks of the more active? Again, we are failing our community.

A few years ago in the columns of the JC, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz was quoted as saying that we are not doing what we ought in Britain to find the outlying members of our community and re-attach them. With the conscious ghettoization of Anglo-Jewry away from the provinces to London and Manchester, and the focus on limited targets, we are missing thousands if not tens of thousands whose mere presence on a census or in a locality would help to make the lives of the whole community here simpler, and who would help Jewish causes to have a more careful hearing in the corridors of power. Rev Weismann tells me that there could be a million Jews in the UK in total! May the coming year bring a return of the Exiles, and particularly of those exiled for whatever reason from the Jewish community, to swell our ranks and increase our pride in our community." (source)