Minorities must feel comfortable in the future Israel

SOONER RATHER than later, Israel’s future will be decided by the ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities. But each community is still learning how to build a better future for and by all Israeli citizens.

The goals and activities of the ultraOrthodox programme at the Citizens Accord Forum, which I coordinate, are to promote mutual responsibility, participation and equal opportunity among Israel’s future decision-makers. All our activities advance a shared society and a sustainable democracy in Israel.

Among our projects are headmasters discussing ways to deal with problems in education, rabbis and imams working together on issues from graves to holy places, and facilitating groups trying to establish codes for using public areas such as universities, hospitals and parks.

Minorities must feel comfortable in public spaces. Some demographic studies tell us that ultra-Orthodox Jews and Muslims already comprise 50 per cent of Israel’s population, so this is about Israel’s future.

When Israel was established, the Zionist vision was to bring together Jews from around the world and mould them into one prototype.

This might have been a fantastic dream, but it is causing the chaos we are experiencing now.

People didn’t dream that there would be ultra-Orthodox, Muslims, and national-Zionists living in one state. If we could change this flawed attitude and decide to respect everyone’s different ways of life in Israel, we would all have a better future together.

For my wife and I, inter-faith dialogue means putting everybody around a table and deciding how we should act to solve mutual problems.

My wife, Rebbetzin Shoshana Menachem, runs a group for religious Arab women and Jewish women who meet once a month to exchange their feelings and problems. Shoshana tells me that people stare from the street and wonder what those people are doing together. Yet by sitting together they have already made a statement.

That is our aim — to show that we love each other, care for each other, and try to help each other by working out our problems together.

But one of the major concerns for our future is the obstacles that we face with the next generation. Joint Jewish and Arab activities at the Citizens Accord Forum

These days, children are playing computer games and watching television and that is not the traditional Haredi way of the home. Arab women also say one of their main problems is that their children are on Facebook and their mobile phones all day.

Technology has made everything about ‘the self’. Nowadays people simply have Facebook friends, and this is enough for them.

Previously when people lived in communities, you needed a minyan for prayers three times a day. On Shabbat, you also need a community around you. So, our way of understanding the community is different from our children. Children have access to anything online, and this is dangerous. We need to find a way to guide children and teenagers of all communities to find beautiful things within technology, and not just the threats that we see.

We now know that the future of Israel is the ultra-Orthodox population. We are going to be a majority 20 years from now and out of responsibility, we need to take care of the future of the State.

Instead of dealing with domestic Charedi budgets and benefits, we must take the responsibility into our own hands for how we think the State should be run. Who will be the decision-makers and, more importantly, what will those decisions be?

Our children would like to be lawyers, accountants, computer programmers, apps producers and designers, which is a big challenge. We will need doctors and pilots, so who will those doctors and pilots be?

Who will take care of Israel’s economy? We have groups of rabbis and academics getting together to discuss how we view the economy in relation to the Halacha. But ultimately, it is our responsibility to ensure that all of Israel’s citizens feel comfortable living here. Rabbi Shemtov Menachem is chairman of the Rabbis Committee for InterReligious Dialogue on behalf of the United Nations, and is the coordinator of the ultra-Orthodox programme at the Citizens Accord Forum (CAF). You can read a full interview with him in the next issue of the Fathom journal. More information on the Citizens Accord Forum is at www.caf.org.il