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The Challenge of Connecting to American Jewry

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We reported Sunday on the new partnership agreement signed between the Jewish Agency and Nefesh B’Nefesh dealing with Aliyah from North America.

Writing in today’s Jerusalem Post, an analysis on what this does, and does not, mean from their Jewish world correspondent, Haviv Rettig:

Analysis: Making aliya the American way

It would be a mistake to view the agreement announced on Sunday between the Jewish Agency and Nefesh B’Nefesh to cede aliya promotion in North America to the smaller organization as a mere logistical arrangement, as Jewish Agency spokespeople have claimed in recent days.

Nor is the Jewish Agency’s ceding ground in itself a history-changing event, as Nefesh B’Nefesh officials believe.

Even so, Sunday’s announcement was a momentous one. It amounted to a recognition by the Jewish Agency that the Jewish world has changed. The agency has come to recognize that the spectacularly successful tools it has developed over some eight decades, during which it brought over three million Jews to Israel, do not work in the United States.

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  1. With all do respect to NBN, and I am a huge fan of the American privatization model, the Jewish Agency has done one thing far better in reaching out to American Jewry — they have acknowledged and spoken the language of Reform and Conservative Jewry. Instead of speaking ‘yeshivish’ or assuming everyone has a yeshiva background, the Jewish Agency has reached out to promote not only Jewish education but used the type of language that speaks to non-Orthodox (even, I must add, religiously observant non-Orthodox Jews) Jews FAR better than Nefesh b’Nefesh whose outreach to Conservative Jews inadvertently implied that Conservative Jews aren’t religious. While NBN is going out of their way to reach out to the haredim (the blogger conference was one example), they are ignoring and even becoming defensive instead of working to bring in the many Conservative (and Reform and Reconstructionist) Jews that will make aliya if their concerns are spoken to and their language (hint, it’s not Yeshivish and it’s not Ashkenazi Hebrew) is spoken.