Israeli
Government Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews
By Jonathan Cook
AlterNet
September 8, 2009.
The Israeli government has launched a television and Internet advertising
campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who
may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.
The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as "scare
tactics," are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young
Diaspora Jews by encouraging their move to Israel.
The campaign, which cost $800,000, was created in response to reports that half
of all Jews outside Israel marry non-Jews. It is just one of several initiatives
by the Israeli state and private organizations to try to increase the size of
Israel's Jewish population.
According to one ad, voiced over by one of the country's leading news anchors,
assimilation is "a strategic national threat," warning: "More than 50 percent of
Diaspora youth assimilate and are lost to us."
Adam Keller, of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, said this was a reference
both to a general fear in Israel that the Jewish people may one day disappear
through assimilation and to a more specific concern that, if it is to survive,
Israel must recruit more Jews to its "demographic war" against Palestinians.
The issue of assimilation has been thrust into the limelight by a series of
surveys over several years carried out by the Jewish People Policy Planning
Institute, a think tank established in Jerusalem in 2002 comprising leading
Israeli and Diaspora officials.
The institute's research has shown that Israel is the only country in the world
with a significant Jewish population not decreasing in size. The decline
elsewhere is ascribed both to low birth rates and to widespread intermarriage.
According to the institute, about half of all Jews in Western Europe and the
United States assimilate by intermarrying, while the figure for the former
Soviet Jewry is reported to reach 80 percent.
Israel, whose Jewish population of 5.6 million accounts for 41 percent of
worldwide Jewry, has obstructed intermarriage between its Jewish and Arab
citizens by refusing to recognize such marriages unless they are performed
abroad.
The advertising campaign is directed particularly at Jews in the United States
and Canada, whose combined 5.7 million Jews constitute the world's largest
Jewish population. Most belong to the liberal Reform stream of Judaism that,
unlike Orthodoxy, does not oppose intermarriage.
One-third of Jews in the Diaspora are believed to have relatives in Israel.
According to the campaign's organizers, more than 200 Israelis rang a hot line
to report names of Jews living abroad after the first TV advertisement was run
on Wednesday. Callers left details of e-mail addresses and Facebook and Twitter
accounts.
The 30-second clip featured a series of missing-persons posters on street
corners, in subways and on telephone boxes showing images of Jewish youths above
the word "Lost" in different languages. A voiceover asks anyone who "knows a
young Jew living abroad" to call the hot line: "Together, we will strengthen
their connection to Israel, so that we don't lose them."
The campaign supports a government-backed program, Masa, that subsidizes stays
and courses in Israel of up to one year in a bid to persuade Jews to immigrate
and become citizens. About 8,000 Diaspora Jews attend its program each year.
The government has been trying to develop Masa alongside a rival program,
Birthright Israel, which brings nearly 20,000 Diaspora youngsters to Israel each
year on sponsored 10-day trips to meet Israeli soldiers and visit sites in
Israel and the West Bank that are promoted as important to the Jewish people.
Although Birthright is regarded as useful in encouraging a positive image of
Israel, officials fear it has only a limited effect on attracting its mainly
North American participants to move to Israel. Many regard it as an all-paid
holiday.
Differences in the approach of the two programs were underlined in July when a
Birthright director, Shlomo Lifshittz, resigned and moved to Masa after telling
the Israeli media he had been forbidden from urging Birthright participants to
migrate to Israel and shun intermarriage.
In launching the campaign, Masa's chief executive, Ayelet Shilo-Tamir, warned
that assimilation worldwide was putting Jews "on the verge of negative growth."
Masa officials said young Jews who participate in their
projects strengthened their Jewish identity and were more likely to become
politically and socially active on behalf of Israel-related issues.
The campaign quickly provoked a storm of debate on Jewish blogs, especially in
the United States, with some terming it "divisive" and an insult to Jewish
offspring of intermarriage. A link to Masa's "Lost" campaign had been dropped
from the front page of its Web site yesterday, possibly in response to the
backlash.
The campaign will probably strike a chord in Israel, however, where a poll in
2007 found that 46 percent of Israeli Jews believed all Jews should live in
Israel because it was "the only way Israel and the Jewish people will be
strengthened."
That position has been echoed by Israel's leaders, although most have been
careful not to upset the delicate balance of relations with Diaspora
communities.
Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was widely regarded as having overstepped
those bounds in 2004 during a visit to France when he urged French Jews to come
to Israel because France was experiencing "the spread of the wildest
anti-Semitism."
Sharon had been outspoken in wanting 1 million Jews to immigrate to Israel to
counter a "demographic threat" from the rapid growth of the Palestinian
populations in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Numerical parity between
Jews and Palestinians living in the region is expected to be reached within a
decade.
That theme has been picked up by his successors, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin
Netanyahu.
There is growing concern in Israel that immigration rates have steadily declined
since a large wave of 1 million Jews arrived from the former Soviet Union
through the 1990s. The absorption figure for last year -- 16,500 -- was the
lowest since the 1980s. It is also believed that there is a growing trend of
better-off Jews leaving Israel to live abroad, although figures are not
publicized.
Keller, of Gush Shalom, said few Jews in the United States or Europe, the main
target of the campaign, needed to come to Israel for material reasons.
"They come from ideological motives, and many of them are right-wing
nationalists who can be encouraged to settle in the West Bank."
The Israeli government and various organizations subsidize the immigration of
Diaspora Jews to Israel.
Last year, the Jewish Agency handed over responsibility for locating new
immigrants to Nefesh B'Nefesh, a private organization that promotes on its Web
site a dozen settlements in the West Bank, including hard-line communities such
as Kedumim, near Nablus, and Efrat, near Bethlehem.
"Last week, Israeli TV showed a group of immigrants arriving in Israel to go to
Efrat," Keller said. "They were shown being greeted at the airport by a large
clapping crowds of Israelis waving flags in support."
A
shorter version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.
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