We have failed the hostages.
Yes, there have been several wonderful grassroots initiatives and the outstanding work of the lawyers Adam Rose and Adam Wagner. As a community though, we have not done our best.
I went on some of the marches and listened to the many speeches, but today, demonstrations need really huge numbers, which we will never have. Even then, their impact is negligible, beyond a bit of short-term news coverage… if you’re lucky.
Notwithstanding the valiant efforts of Hen Mazzig, Eitan Chitayat, Elica Le Bon and others, social media is also not the solution. Whilst their content is excellent, the algorithm means that it’s largely preaching to the converted. At least these tireless individuals have moved beyond the virtual world and are raising their voices loudly in the real one, as we should have all been doing.
Where is the outrage from our communal leaders? Of course, I’m not ignoring the meetings with ministers or the behind-the-scenes engagements, but all of this needed the very public backdrop of huge communal anger at the continued imprisonment of the hostages.
Instead, our visible outrage has largely been confined to an enamelled yellow ribbon badge. I’m all for elegant design, but this wasn’t the way either. We should have taken our lead from the parents of hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. They chose the most emotive of daily reminders of their son’s plight: a torn piece of masking tape stuck to their chest, handwritten every morning with the number of days of their son’s captivity. Even after his murder, they have continued to do this.
Imagine if all of us had done the same every day since this nightmare began – yes, for 600 days. Imagine the conversations this would have started. For sure there would have been some difficult ones, but tens of thousands of Jews in this country going about their daily lives displaying this constant pointed reminder of the hostages would have had impact. Better still, imagine if hundreds of thousands of Jews across the world had been doing this every day.
I am not naive to think that it would have brought about the hostages’ freedom, but the mere act of writing this number out every day would have kept them right at the forefront of our lives, as well as those around us. Crucially, the campaign for the hostages is the one issue around which we can all be united. Many of us have strong views on the future quest for peace but now is not the time to divide ourselves. The sole priority for our focus has been, and must remain, the return of all the hostages.
Lionel Salama.
For the hostages, kidnapped during the worst act of mass Jewish murder since the Holocaust, we have not campaigned – a continuous, relentless effort – as we did for Soviet Jews. We did that for many years and yet now, after a mere 600 days, we seem to have given up. We certainly have greater resources today, but do our leaders have the will to use them?
Almost forty years ago, in the days of Mikhail Gorbachev, the campaign for Soviet Jews realised that demonstrations no longer had impact and turned to advertisements featuring the stories of refuseniks. Faced with the success of his PR machine, it opted to buy the space to amplify the campaign. I wonder why this approach hasn’t been used today, with an advertisement every day featuring a different hostage, along with billboards everywhere. Were they not worth the investment? Social media posts are free, but they aren’t working.
Fifty-one years ago, in the middle of the Yom Kippur War, I went to synagogue with my parents. It was my first experience of a fundraising appeal for Israel and I naively asked them if my pocket money could make a difference.
Israel was fighting for its survival and thousands of miles away; we gathered to watch a VHS recording from the News at Ten. The range of channels through which we can now access this news in real-time may have radically transformed our exposure, but the fear, anxiety and concern for Israel’s future is the same. And like that child of eleven, we all want to know what we can do to make a difference and that needs powerful leadership.
My passion for the Jewish world ever since stems from seeing Israel prevail in the face of incredible adversity. On campus, during the Lebanon War, I was active in the Jewish and Israel societies, as well as the campaign for Soviet Jews. Indeed, it was the fight for their freedom that catalysed my generation’s engagement in Jewish life. Interestingly, there are signs that the past 20 months has seen the identity of those with little connection to Israel strengthened, whilst at the same time polarising those who were previously engaged.
After university, I worked for UJS and EUJS, where I supported students who, as always, were regularly at the forefront of defending Jewish rights. In Sunderland, where the infamous UN Resolution 3379 (‘Zionism is racism’) was used to ban the Jewish society and then overturned.
When President Reagan chose to visit the graves of former SS officers in Bitburg, thousands of Jewish students came from all over Europe to protest their disgust. And we joined the worldwide campaign to drive the newly elected President of Austria, former SS officer, Kurt Waldheim out of office. ‘Never again’ was always front of mind.
For 30 years, I’ve had the pleasure of working in an agency which has helped many Jewish and Israeli charities raise their profiles and considerable amounts of money. And if that wasn’t enough involvement, a decade ago I co-founded a kosher food business. Yet after my fabulous Jewish journey, I am more worried than ever about the future of our community.
Our children are leaving
Before 7 October 2023, the future of our community was already in danger. For many years, young Jews had been disengaging in large numbers because there had been little to interest them on their terms. Recently things have obviously got a whole lot worse, with the huge rise in antisemitism understandably driving many more to hide their Jewish identity.
Thirty years ago, when Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l launched his Jewish Continuity initiative, ramping up the number of children in Jewish secondary schools was seen as the panacea. Sadly, it hasn’t been and though we now have many young Jews with good academic qualifications, they aren’t imbued with a desire to be loud and proud Jews – and their knowledge of and ability to discuss Israel is sorely lacking.
Jewish student life in the 21st century is also radically different from my time on campus. The growth in attendance at Jewish secondary schools has had a profound impact on engagement at university and it’s not good. After seven years in high school, many of our students are less inclined to engage in Jewish things on campus. Lose them at university though and it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reconnect with them later.
The challenge starts at 12 and continues to probably around 32. Although there are a myriad of interventions seeking to help – bar/batmitzvah programmes, youth movements, Israel trips, secondary schools, campus organisations and young adult programmes – a comprehensive plan over these two decades, linking all of this together in the most effective way possible, has not been developed. From time to time, an element will get an injection of funds – a sticking plaster – in the hope it will deliver more engagement.
Bizarrely, in all other aspects of our lives we are ready to respond to the challenges of the digital revolution, but the Jewish world remains well behind the curve. No one seems to have been watching whilst the smartphone grabbed the attention of our next generation.
A much broader and experimental menu than currently on offer is urgently required, driven by what our young people think is needed (not by my age-group and those older) and one that is far better funded.
Time to talk about the silent generation
The wonderful Netflix series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones by Dan Buettner, offers hope of how we might live a longer life, better. But for many in the Silent Generation – those aged between 79 and 99, Buettner’s ideas are a long way from their current reality.
The work of charities like Jewish Care, Nightingale Hammerson and The Fed, has established wonderful standards in residential care homes. But not everyone will be able to afford a place in one, nor indeed will want to go in for quite a few years. Indeed, estimates suggest that less than 10% of our Silent Generation are currently in a care home. So, it’s good living in the community that we need to address.
Every week, we hear more about the national crisis in health and social care. The scale of the problem is so frightening that it’s hard to see how any Government can solve it, but we can try to address it in our community. Our long-standing commitment to welfare should give us the confidence to bring our thinking to this challenge. As with our successes in care homes, we might also create new exemplars for the rest of the country.
Unlike the politicians, we can be entirely honest at the challenge before us. We can also collaborate for the total good. No single charity is going to solve this; organisations will need to come together to create a viable strategy for our community.
There are three factors to address if we are to deliver a holistic approach, enabling the Silent Generation to live well outside of the care home environment: advocacy, care worker support and rehousing.
Form-filling and bureaucracy can be challenging for many of us, but for the Silent Generation it can quickly become a nightmare. Often it seems that the mountain of paperwork is designed to hinder their chances of getting what they are legally entitled to. We have an excellent community organisation in Paperweight, with considerable experience and success in addressing just these problems. Indeed, it has taken the initiative to appoint its first Adult Social Care Coordinator; it will need many more to provide the scale of advocacy needed.
Living longer unfortunately sees many experiencing health challenges and doing so in their home often requires external support. There are not enough care workers and those that exist are poorly rewarded for this vital work. The responsibility it demands is very pressurising, causing many to leave the profession, especially when they can often earn the same amount stacking shelves in a supermarket. For the client, the cost per hour of care in the home is often more than double the salary paid to the care worker. One way this might be addressed in our community is through the establishment of a not-for-profit care worker agency. In simple terms, the care worker would be paid a far more respectable salary, and the client would also be happy, paying much less per hour.
Lastly, we need to address the need for rehousing. Many in the Silent Generation are living in homes too large for their needs. Their children are long gone – many are married with their own children, leaving the grandparents isolated in the old family home. Isolation shortens life and so ideally, they need a smaller flat in a supported living environment, for which they have more than enough capital. The challenge here though is insufficient supply. However, there are a number of underused buildings in our community – synagogues, which could be repurposed for this, helping to create new micro communities around a smaller fit-for-purpose synagogue. It would be a win for all concerned.
A communal structure fit for purpose
According to the think-tank New Philanthropy Capital, the Jewish community has a total annual budget of £1bn. It’s hard to conceive of a company with such an income operating without a strategic plan for sustaining its position. And if such a company were faced with threats to its continued existence, wouldn’t we imagine it responding quickly and looking for ways to innovate?
We are not short of communal leaders, but this leadership has more successfully manifested itself on the financial front – fabulously so – than in strategic thinking. Indeed, our community has an extraordinary capacity to fundraise for its charities – hundreds of millions of pounds every year – and yet our leaders seem unable to develop a long-term vision.
Where does our community want to be in 2040? Or even 2030 – that’s only 55 months away now. Instead, there’s an all too familiar pattern of a commission here or a study there, focused on a single issue, followed by donor money providing another sticking plaster.
All over the world, Diaspora Jewish communities are having to come to terms with the changing demographics and the disengagement of many from Jewish life. Jews in London, Paris, Sydney and San Francisco are all facing similar challenges. However, we rarely connect with them to learn from their experiences.
Yes, there are a few pockets of growth, a few initiatives that might buck the trend. But overall, outside of the Charedi community, the future looks bleak. Whether you are United, Masorti, Reform, Liberal or unaffiliated, we are all in same ark.
The future of Jewish charitable giving is itself dependent on whether we succeed in engaging the next generation. Already the alarm bells are ringing, with a worrying generational breakdown emerging among donor families. Their grandparents gave from the heart – thank goodness some are still around to provide support.
Their parents are now guided by their head and are asking the tough questions about impact. And the children? Well, they are increasingly disengaged from our community and therefore disinclined to give to it at all. As one major donor put it, “98 percent of the funding is coming from 2% of the community”. It is not an unbelievable scenario: 5,000 people (let’s say 1,000 families) providing most of the donations and one which is certainly not guaranteed to continue.
Next generation donors want to see the impact of their support and are keen to see efficiencies achieved by the causes receiving their funding. The current Jewish communal architecture is not set up to deliver this. We need to move on from the siloed approach to our community’s operations, consolidating as soon as possible.
Many of those running these organisations – professionals and lay-leaders – are of course the turkeys who wouldn’t vote for Chanukah. But should the sustainability of our community really be held back by this? A consolidated structure would not only release funding from duplication – especially in areas such as marketing and fundraising – to support front line services but would also enable our community to cope far better with shocks like the increase in employer’s national insurance.
Undoubtedly, antisemitism is the worst it’s been in most of our lifetimes, but I don’t think it will bring about the end of Jewish life in this country. Sadly, we are back in the days of the outrageous UN resolution ‘Zionism is racism’, this time weaponised by social media. However, like those challenging times, with innovation and serious investment over a number of years, the climate will eventually change for the better.
In the meantime, though, we must not lose sight of the need to address the internal challenges to our survival. As the Prime Minster would say, we need to regain a vision of our future. And it needs the widest communal conversation on how to achieve it.
Time isn’t on our side, which is why we’ve called our initiative Achshav – the Hebrew for “now”. After all, it’s never too early to start building a better future. You can help by giving your thoughts at achshav.org
- Lionel Salama is co-founder of HOPE, an agency which helps organisations with a social purpose tell their story and raise money.
