Our recent paltry record can be contrasted with what was achieved about forty years ago. Camp Sternberg, which has assisted thousands of Orthodox families, was established because pressure was put on Federation. Nowadays, Federation gives a pittance to Sternberg.
But that’s not the story I want to tell. Several years after Sternberg opened, Federation attempted to gain control. This effort was publicly resisted and defeated. Ohel Children’s Home is another example from around this period. Its establishment and recognition by governmental agencies came about because dedicated people who were more interested in meeting our communal needs than in being popular fought Federation’s efforts to derail Ohel.
If situations like Sternberg and Ohel would arise in 2006, it is doubtful that our leadership would have the courage to fight for our community’s needs. There would be Orthodox insiders cautioning, “Be quiet, don’t make trouble. We have friends at Federation and we will make a deal.”
After all, they haven’t fought Federation on behalf of yeshivas and day schools -why, then, should we expect them to take on the establishment when the stakes are even smaller?
As Jewish philanthropy has shifted toward private foundations established by persons who have amassed great wealth, once more the Orthodox community is missing an opportunity, although insiders have exploited their contacts to benefit the institutions and organizations in which they are involved while failing to advocate on behalf of our schools and other broad communal needs.
Today’s Orthodoxy – call it the new new style of American Orthodoxy – craves access and acceptance and has a fawning relationship with those who are hostile to religious values and practices, as was evident at the Siyum Hashas when honor was accorded to Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and others who have fought against religion and what Orthodox Jewry stands for.
Our new style is epitomized by Agudath Israel’s Am Echad project which is no more than an empty slogan that brings no one closer to Yiddishkeit while it purposely sends out the message to secular Jews – many of whom are not Jewish according to halacha – that despite their opposition to what we believe and practice, we are one people. This despite their acceptance of intermarriage, advocacy of gay marriage and much else that is alien to our idea of peoplehood.
Are we one people today, given the wholesale abandonment of religiosity? Forty years ago, when intermarriage was a small fraction of what it is now and when most Jews still practiced certain essentials of our faith, our Torah leaders did not trumpet an empty slogan of Am Echad. Rather, we asserted our independence.
In the 1950’s, when by all counts we should have been weak and when our independence resulted in the loss of support for our yeshivas, we fought, under the transcendent leadership of the great rosh yeshiva of Lakewood, Rav Aharon Kotler, and other Torah giants, against the induction of women into the Israeli Army and we rejected membership in boards of rabbis with non-Orthodox clergy.
