Egalitarian yeshivot can help bridge Israel’s religious divide
Most people associate the image of yeshivah students with a black kippah and trailing tzitzit. But it is an image that Jason Lever, a trustee of the Brighton and Hove Reform Synagogue, is eager to dispel. The self-described “religious, non-Orthodox Jew” has recently come back from fourand-a-half months study at the Conservative (Masorti) Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He is convinced the type of learning it offers constitutes the way forward for modern Jewish education and that its ethos can help unite a polarised Israeli society.
Mr Lever, 48, took a sabbatical from his job as education policy manager for the Mayor of London to attend the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Centre for Conservative Judaism, which, like a few other organisations such as the Pardes Institute of Jewish Learning, Shalom Hartman Institute in Israel and Hadar in the USA, offer different styles of Jewish study in an egalitarian setting.
But the path is not always easy — he found his attempt to obtain a student visa for his trip full of unexplained frustrations.
“The delays in responding to my application frankly felt like a tactic which, I have since been told, is something that happens on a regular basis to people applying to attend these non-Orthodox establishments”, he recalled.
“After my initial application for the student visa was submitted to the Israeli Embassy in London, I was told that the Conservative Yeshiva was not an accredited institution. My Jewish identity was questioned so many times, even after I provided the required documents and after my rabbi from Brighton, Andrea Zanardo, sent them a letter confirming my being Jewish.
“The whole thing was getting so ridiculous that in my emails I actually introduced myself using my Hebrew name, Zadok David ben Bezalel ben Emanuel ben Nathan H’Levi, sent a link to a website about my great-uncle, which shows my Jewish heritage going back four generations, mentioned that I write guest blogs for my employer, the Mayor of London, on Jewish issues and even offered to send a selfie alongside my forefathers’ grave on the Mount of Olives. But I ended up travelling to Israel on a tourist visa.”
His request to study was only officially approved, he says, when Rabbi Andrew Sacks, director of the (Conservative) Rabbinical Assembly in Israel, and Rabbi Steven Wornick, the former chief executive of the United Syna- gogue of Conservative Judaism in the USA, which runs the Conservative Yeshivah, took up his case at the highest levels of the Jewish Agency and Israeli government.
Rabbi Sacks said the obstacles Mr Lever faced were “utterly unnecessary. We, at the Conservative Yeshivah, come across cases of discrimination against non-Orthodox institutions and individuals regularly. I must stress, though, that most people working for the Jewish Agency do their best to work on behalf of applicants.”
David Breakstone, deputy chairman of the Jewish Agency, while agreeing Mr Lever should not have experienced the delays he did, believed they “were technical, rather than deliberate, which were unfortunate but do not reflect on any hidden agenda.”
Once enrolled at the yeshivah and experiencing life in Jerusalem, however, Mr Lever could be positive . “It’s a place for all Jews to come and experience deep learning and practice in Jerusalem. It is a place where Orthodox and Conservative faculty, men and women of all ages and from all over the world, rabbinic and non-rabbinic students, LGBTQ, long-term students as well as visiting guests, all come together to study, pray, debate and celebrate Judaism.”
Institutes like the Conservative Yeshiva, Pardes and Hartman, he believes, form a vital “middle ground” between Israel’s polarised religious and secular groups. “The religious non-Orthodox in the middle understand both the Orthodox and the secular and can create bridges between them, cases of which I saw myself. First, however, there is the need to make Israeli society as well as the diaspora aware of the existence of these type of Jews and their establishments.
“I was talking to an ex-IDF captain in intelligence who became a tour guide and who looked at me in disbelief when I told him that I, like my fellow yeshivah students, am religious, though not Orthodox, and that we practise with egalitarian minyans.”
He noted the view of Natan Sharansky, who, shortly before he left office as chairman of the Jewish Agency, said that politicians in Israel will only listen to the middle ground of liberal religious Jews when they live and vote in bigger numbers in the country.
“In some ways I am an ideal candidate for aliyah,” Mr Lever reflected, “but the obstacles put in my way and the current invisibility of people like me in Israel have made me question this. Certainly when I’m retired, I will start by taking a big road trip to America and stop off each Shabbat in a different synagogue to see my wonderful rabbinical trainee friends from 2018 as fully-fledged community leaders.
“The idea of aliyah still appeals, especially having met so many lovely cousins across Israel, but maybe I am better off helping build up that community from the UK as well as visiting Israel and topping up my study at the wonderful Conservative Yeshiva regularly. Despite my own visa troubles, I don’t want to put off anyone from the UK to consider going there.”
It was a place for all Jews to experience deep learning ’