Should Israelis Be Jews?

The teacher produced a pair of long leather thongs. "These are tefillin, or phylacteries," she said. "They are wrapped around the left arm and the forehead during prayer. And this is a tallith, a prayer shawl."

"Why doesn't my Dad ever wear them?" asked a black-eyed twelve-year-old in the Jerusalem classroom.

"Because your Dad isn't religious," the teacher answered.

"Then I'm not either," snapped the boy, "and I don't want to learn about the silly things."

All over Israel last week students in government-run secular schools were reacting with anger or, curiosity or boredom to a new course of teaching that would have shocked their Zionist forebears on the one hand and their Diaspora ancestors on the other. Orthodox Jews would have been horrified at the thought of a child growing up in Israel without knowing the words of a single prayer or the uses of candles on the Sabbath. And the zealous, Socialist-minded Zionists of a generation ago would never have exposed their children to religious rites, which they viewed as symbols of the ghetto.

Religion = Submission? First-generation Zionists refused to look on the Bible as anything but a history of the Jewish people--a group of the left-wing Mapam movement even bowdlerized the Bible of any reference to God and tried unsuccessfully to promote its use on collective farms. But recently even the most determined agnostics began to feel that this spiritual decontamination policy had gone too far. Young people were contemptuously ignorant of all Jewish tradition and looked down on everything that happened before the turn of the century as belonging to a "submissive people." Explains Headmaster Zebulun Tuchman of Jerusalem's largest school, the Rehavia Gymnasium: "Children who reached school age after the creation of Israel had no interest in the Jewish past, in Jewish literature, in Jewish religion." At the Youth Congress in Moscow last summer, Israeli delegates were embarrassed before their fellow Jews at a Sabbath service when the youngster called up to read the week's passage of Scripture did not have the faintest idea what he was expected to do.

There have been signs that young Israel is beginning to feel some concern at its own religious rootlessness. Newspapers commented on the number of children at the High Holy Day services this year asking their fathers questions about the ritual. When two newspapers offered copies of the Talmud to subscribers at 25% discount, they were flooded with orders from parents whose children were badgering them for a copy of the Jewish Bible.

Religion = Nationalism? The new government program carefully avoids the word "religious." In its pamphlet distributed to teachers last week, the Ministry of Education refers to learning about Talmud and Torah, tallith and tefillin as "inspiration from the glorious past of the Jewish nation." This sedulously secular approach, many teachers in religious schools think, dooms the program from the start. Said one teacher: "Sacred matters are being treated as if they were small change. The children will be confused and unimpressed."

But the government plan suggests a sense of urgency. Said one Ministry of Education official last week: "Even the nonreligious among us are beginning to appreciate what we owe to our religion. The Jewish religion has tremendous historical value, and our children must not grow up without understanding it. Perhaps we won't even be able to continue to exist as a nation if we continue to deny our link with our religion. Religion is especially tied to nationalism in Israel."

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