Skype’sthelimitforLimmudMerseysiders
“TECHNOLOGY IS wonderful when it works, isn’t it?” remarked a participant in Sunday’s Liverpool Limmud.
Its organisers might have been tempting fate when they chose to have keynote speaker Professor Alan Dershowitz deliver his address from America by Skype. But although the leading pro-Israel activist could not hear his audience, assembled in three different rooms at the King David School campus, they, fortunately, were able to hear him. Follow-up questions were transmitted by email to his smartphone.
His call to battle against the antiIsrael boycott campaign brought the city’s biennial day of Jewish learning to a rousing close. A Labour win in the next UK election would be a “disaster for Israel”, he said. But if he were a Labour member, he would remain in the party, fighting to restore it to its former traditions of support for the Jewish state.
The attendance of 400, in line with the organisers’ target, might have been greater had Liverpool not been playing at Anfield. As news filtered through of victory over Watford, a triumphant cry of “top of the league” rose from the corridors.
“We have people from St Andrews to the south coast,” said Professor Bernard Jackson, chairman of the organising committee.
He had aimed for “a more challenging programme” this year, with a choice of more than 50 sessions. There was a strong contingent of presenting academics and themed tracks including interfaith and small communities, as well as external and internal challenges to Jewish life.
While classes grappled with the psychology of terrorism or pluralism in Islam, “we also have an unusual lighter side”, Professor Jackson said.
One of the cultural performers, comic Penelope Solomons, attracted a “room full” sign with her one-woman show,
resisting suggestions that she might alter its title for her mid-afternoon slot.
Dr Bart Wallet flew in from Amsterdam, where he teaches at Vrije University, to lead a session on ritual slaughter and circumcision in Europe. “It was a marvellous programme with great speakers,” he said.
From even further afield, Rabbi Yisoscher Katz of New York, one of the leading voices of open Orthodoxy, offered “a first-hand report from the ideological battleground” between different parts of the Orthodox world.
In the “shuk”, members of the Father’s House Sabbath Congregation from north Wales sold aloe vera and other products from Israel on their stall. A Christian community of 120, it meets to pray on Saturday rather than Sunday and keeps biblical festivals.
“Our succah comes out every year and it’s decorated by the children,” said Margaret Buckley, administrator of Father’s House. “I haven’t been to a Limmud before — it is really worth coming. The cello recital was fantastic.”
Another visitor was Ibrahim Handal, a Palestinian accountant from Bethlehem, who is over here on a speaking tour with Israeli Guy Segal for Sides Not Solutions, a project for peace movement OneVoice. Mr Handal praised Limmud as “awesome. The people are lovely.
“They want to understand the Palestinian narrative and that’s good. We are sending the message we don’t have to be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli but pro-solution.”
The parallel youth programme included biblical theatre and graffiti art.