Our rabbis and Federation leaders are silently and passively watching the massive exodus of our young people from 4,000 years of Jewish heritage because our Jewish communities have failed to provide high quality, affordable Jewish education to all our families, irrespective of their denominational stream or family financial circumstances.
To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. There are no quick-fix magic elixirs. The “next great big idea” is 2,000 years old. If we want to address our current crisis of maintaining Jewish continuity, we must give our young families the opportunity to educate their children in a Jewish school. We must realize that young families cannot afford to educate their children without major communal financial support.
Ignoring the crisis will not solve the problem and the recently announced Jewish communal quick fixes won’t work. Any proposed program, short of committing huge massive communal funding to Jewish education, is similar to the vibrating hip belt weight loss machine: silly and absurd, with lots of gyrating vibration and noise, but no positive long-term results.