A New Leadership Mandate

Dear Friends,

As we approach this new year, it dawned on me that everything about my life right now feels new. A new job. A new house. New schools for my children. A new professional mission. It makes going into the new year a combination of slight apprehension and a great deal of excitement. Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to feel at this time of the year. Judaism for us should be a confrontation with tradition and an opportunity to grow and change and experience life anew.

It also occurred to me that the tension of new and old is a nexus that the Jewish Agency as a whole is experiencing. On the one hand, it is an eighty year old organization that faced the major trials and victories of Israel and our people before Israel was even a state. It was and is at the frontlines of immigration and rescue, again and again. It prepares people world-over to make their homes in Israel and to strengthen Jewish identity wherever Jews live. These goals represent both the modern and the ancient dreams of our people.

Now the Jewish Agency has taken on new leadership and a new mandate, to build Jewish peoplehood in an era when not every Jew feels like a member of our family. We are here to empower, to connect and to inspire Jews around the world to make their Jewish lives more vital and engaging, in Israel and across the globe.

Someone recently asked me how the Jewish Agency could take on a new mission when it is a relatively old organization. Why change something that is working? I responded that our task as Jews has always been to evolve as a people while holding on to an enduring sense of purpose. And I believe that the Jewish Agency is doing just that, evolving to meet the needs of a fast-paced changing world while affirming its commitment to an enduring vision. I see no contradiction in that, only growth and passion. It is a gift to be a part of a people 4000 years old that created a new state in the twentieth century, one that has been at the cusp of scientific discovery and technological advancements. The combination of old and new keeps us anchored and helps us strive.

This year I hope we can all approach our lives enmeshed in tradition and immersed in newness. And with that blessing, I want to wish you, your families, and our Jewish family around the world a joyous New Year and a year of peace, social justice and prosperity.

Shana tova,



Misha

A Note from Eastern Europe

Dear Friends,

Last time I wrote to you about a remarkable story of peoplehood. I met a young woman on my mission to Israel and Eastern Europe, Natasha, who I was distantly related to. She grew her Jewish identity through the web of Jewish Agency offerings. In response to my Musings, I got the gift of another story. With permission, I’d like to share a piece of Amanda’s e-mail with you.

Your email really came at a good time for me to read. You see- I'm a young Jewish woman who up until the last few years - had little identity to speak of. I was adopted out of a bad situation at the age of 5 with a brother and sister. My biological mother is a Jewish woman- but she was unable to care for us. My biological father is a drug addict with an extensive prison record and is (brace yourself) a member of the Aryan brotherhood. I also have cousins that are shot callers in the Nazi Lowriders. Obviously- not the ideal environment to be raised in. Anyway, I was adopted by a nice family. Stay at home mom and dad was a cop. We were raised Catholic but I always felt somehow different.

This young woman looked into her background and discovered that her birth mother is Jewish. She found her first family and studied with a rabbi and is now going to Israel herself, hopefully with the help of Masa Israel Journey. She concluded with these words: “I love being Jewish - and I love the mystery and passion we as the Jewish people have. I'm so proud to be Jewish.”Hers is a story of discovering a powerful hidden identity that is now a source of pride.

I write this in the wake of immense turmoil over the conversion bill in Israel and link you to an op/ed I recently wrote for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about this critical topic.

Maimonides, the medieval Jewish thinker, answered a convert who wondered if he could pray referencing the language of his ancestors since he just became Jewish, that when a convert prays he or she uses the same wording. Why? Because when you become Jewish, you inherit the past as well as change your future.

Amanda, welcome to the family. May we all embrace those who want to become part of our people, those with biological roots and those who make the courageous choice to join the fate of Am Yisrael, the Jewish nation.



Misha

Greetings from St. Petersburg.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from St. Petersburg. Think of this as my postcard to you. I have been in my new role with the Jewish Agency for Israel for only a couple of weeks and have traveled throughout Israel and Eastern Europe with federationmissions on a whirlwind of Jewish identity. Now I am on a White Nights Mission with a wonderful group of New York and Washington, D.C. leaders who are learning about Jewish life behind what was once the Iron Curtain. 

Something remarkable always happens on these trips and my little miracle happened yesterday. We were sitting in the Jewish Community Center -- Yesod -- of St. Petersburg having lunch with a group of special young people. We were going around the tables, asking them some very basic questions about their lives, much as any of us do when we meet new people.

Meet Natasha. She went to a JAFI summer camp where she first learned about Jewish life. She went to Israel onBirthright and then did a long-term program in Israel through Masa, an Agency funded opportunity to spend a semester in Israel. She then went on a leadership development program and, paying it forward, served as a youth leader in the city of Novgorod. As it happened, she just moved to St. Petersburg for a new job she was starting the next day and came to lunch to meet new people.

But I’m not telling you about Natasha because she is an emerging leader in Russia or because she is a poster child for the Jewish Agency’s work. I’m telling you about Natasha because when I asked her where she is from, she named the little shtetle where my father grew up and where as a six year old he watched his father, the town rabbi and the rest of his family get murdered as a young boy sitting in the branches of a mulberry tree. Natasha’s family got out just in time and escaped the fate of my grandparents. 

Realizing this, we both searched excitedly for some way in which to connect through this shared past. It didn’t take long until we discovered that we are actually related. She mentioned a relative who was my father’s first cousin and responsible for his very survival, a man who traveled to America to raise funds for the war effort. The two of us are magically linked by virtue of a hero to us both. 

Natasha is the reason that I do the work that I do. When you believe in Jewish peoplehood you believe that we are all part of an extended family with a mission. Every once in a while, you realize that this description isn’t only symbolic or emotional. Sometimes it’s very real. Natasha, welcome to my family. It’s not only about our newly found connection as relatives, however distant. It is about being part of the remarkable family called the Jewish people. Welcome to our family.

See you back in America.



Misha

A Passover Message

Dear Friends,
 
We always think of Passover as a difficult journey to freedom that our ancestors took long ago and one that made us into a nation. Great journeys can accomplish just that. This Passover, I want you to think about your involvement in making another journey to freedom happen today. In 2011, the Government of Israel -- after much advocacy by American Jewish communities -- asked The Jewish Agency to take responsibility for operations in Gondar Province, Ethiopia, to facilitate the aliyah of the Falash Mura, the last group of Beta Israel Jews. 

We are now completing the journey that we started decades ago, bringing the final group of Ethiopian immigrants to their Jewish homeland. 

In 2010, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior identified 7,864 members of the Falash Mura who were eligible for aliyah. That number has risen and the Government of Israel made a decision to increase the rate of aliyah in February 2012. This means The Jewish Agency had to renovate and prepare absorption centers and do the groundwork in Ethiopia and Israel. To date the “Completing the Journey” mission supported by our partners – Jewish Federations of North America, Keren Hayesod and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has helped over 5,000 individuals make aliyah while 2,000 more are waiting. We hope to bring the last person to Israel by this fall, bringing this historic chapter of Ethiopian aliyah to a close. We still need to raise about $2 million to pay for this operation but we are confident that our partners will accomplish this working with us. Your help with this effort in celebration of Passover would go a long way towards that goal. 

Imagine for a moment, the very last Ethiopian boarding the plane for Israel. Imagine the announcement in the news when the job is done that Israel is the only country in the modern world to take Africans out of Africa for freedom and not for slavery. It is yet another moment when you stand back and say, “Only in Israel.”

More than 4,600 of the new olim will be participating in their first Passover seders this year in Jerusalem and one of the absorption centers in Israel thanks to the generosity of Jewish Federation and Jewish Agency donors in New York, Cleveland Karen Hayesod countries and elsewhere making special donations for these celebrations to take place.

In the Haggadah we read about our obligation to relive history and recreate it at our tables. This year we have a chance to do more than talk about an ancient story. We can be part of an ongoing exodus to our homeland. I know personally what it means to be part of an exodus. I know what it means to me to know that world Jewry fought for my right to be free. I was a stranger, but thousands of people cared enough to protest until my family could leave the FSU.

The exodus teaches us to make strangers into friends, to fight for freedom against oppression and to make the world into a place of social justice and into a place of dreams. This year, live the dream and help us make history.

Wishing you and those you love a holiday of joy and freedom.  

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