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Rebranding God: The Jewish Revival Movement between Homeland and Diaspora
Author(s): Werczberger, Rachel; Monterescu, Daniel
Date: 2024
Topics: Diaspora, Ethnography, Jewish Renewal, Jewish Revival, Outreach, Baal Teshuvah, Orthodox Judaism, NGOs, Young Adults / Emerging Adulthood, Religious Observance and Practice, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: Against the gloomy forecast of “The Vanishing Diaspora”, the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These “Jewish Revival” and “Jewish Renewal” projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations, the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed “lifestyle Judaism”. This range between institutionalized revival movements and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space of creative agency. Indeed, the trope of a “Jewish Renaissance” has become both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for social action. This article explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post-secular world in two different sociopolitical contexts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, we interrogate the relations between “diaspora” and “homeland” by analyzing two case studies: the Jewish revival movement in Budapest, Hungary, and the Jewish renewal initiatives in Israel. While the first instantiates a diasporic movement anchored in a post-denominational and post-secular attempt to reclaim Jewish tradition for a new generation of Jew-llennials (Millennial Jews), the second group operates against the Orthodox hegemony of the institutional Rabbinate by revisiting religious ritual and textual study. By proposing new cultural repertoires, these movements highlight the dialectic exchange between center and periphery. The ethnography of religious revival decenters the Israeli Orthodoxy as “the homeland” and positions the diaspora at the core of a network of cultural creativity and renewal, while remaining in constant dialog with Israel and other diasporic communities.
Jewish internationalism and the international politics of opposing antisemitism 1960-2005
Author(s): Wiedemann, Emilie
Date: 2024
Topics: Antisemitism: Definitions, Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, Main Topic: Antisemitism, NGOs, Israel-Diaspora Relations
Abstract: This thesis is an examination of the international Jewish and non-Jewish politics of opposing antisemitism between 1960 and 2005. It begins with the condemnation of antisemitism by the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in 1960. It ends with the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s (EUMC) working definition of antisemitism, published in 2005. Between these poles, lay a wealth of contestation about what antisemitism is and how to oppose it. Successive challenges and instability for Israel as well as global geopolitical upheaval during this time raised these questions anew. The thesis centres the political agency of a diverse and evolving group of Jewish internationalist actors, including NGOs, community representatives and academics, and analyses their political responses to this context. I explore how these actors debated and contested ideas about how to identify, measure and oppose antisemitism, and with whom to ally in this struggle. At stake was the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, between anti-antisemitism and anti-racism, between Israel and diaspora, and who represented Jewish interests in the arenas of global governance. These questions brought out significant divides in international Jewish politics, between state and diaspora and among diaspora actors themselves. The thesis ends with an investigation of the immediate roots of the EUMC document in Jewish internationalism; at the same time, I contextualise the EUMC document within the longer arc of the thesis. It was one expression of long-standing, multifaceted and heated debates within international Jewish politics, and of how these debates have played out in international Jewish and non-Jewish political efforts to oppose antisemitism. Overall, I demonstrate that ideas about what antisemitism is were constantly in flux during this period, subject to debate, contestation and negotiation among Jewish and non-Jewish political actors.
Підтримка З Боку Закордонних Благодійних Організацій Як Чинник Розвитку Єврейської Громади України: 2010–2011 Рр
Translated Title: Support From Foreign Charitable Organizations As A Factor Development of the Jewish Community of Ukraine: 2010–2011
Author(s): Козерод, O. B.
Date: 2012
Topics: Charity / Tzedakah, Jewish Organisations, Jewish Community, Main Topic: Other, NGOs
Abstract: Стаття Козерода Олега Віталійовича є першим комплексним дослідженням, присвяченим історії та сучасності
допомоги українським євреям з боку західних благодійних організацій. Стаття містить аналіз характерних рис та
процесу організації благодійної допомоги євреям України у 2010–1011 роках. У підсумку сформульовано основні
висновки щодо ролі «зовнішнього чинника» у розвитку сучасної єврейської громади України
(Anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of racial governance
Author(s): Romeyn, Esther
Date: 2020
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: New Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Main Topic: Antisemitism, NGOs, European Union
Abstract: This article sets out to discuss the emergence of (anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of governance, and particularly as a field of racial governance. Romeyn’s interest is not so much in the ‘facts’ of antisemitism or ‘new’ antisemitism, but in the ways in which it functions as a ‘power-knowledge’ field in which a cast of actors—global governance actors, such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the European Commission, non-governmental organizations, experts and scholars, and politicians—set out to define, invent measuring tools and technologies, analyse, formulate policy statements and programmes, and develop ‘interventions’ to address and redress (‘fight’) the ‘problem’. Embedded in the new antisemitism as a field of governance are the assumptions that, ideologically, it is imbricated in the universalist anti-racism of the liberal left, and that, culturally, it emanates to a significant extent from within ethnocultural or ethno-religious attitudes peculiar to populations originating from Northern Africa, the Maghreb or, more specifically, from majority Islamic countries. With respect to the latter groups, global governance actors concerned with the fight against the ‘new antisemitism’ instate a ‘regime’ that performatively enacts boundaries of belonging. This regime erects an interior frontier around culture/religion that effectively externalizes and racializes antisemitism.
International Organizations: Combatting Anti-Semitism in Europe
Author(s): Whine, Michael
Date: 2004
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Education against, Antisemitism: Monitoring, Diaspora, Jewish Organisations, Main Topic: Antisemitism, NGOs
Abstract: This article describes the processes by which Jewish organizations, led by the major American groups, have tried to alert international organizations to the threat that anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence in Europe again poses to Jewish communities and to democracy itself. At a series of conference of the OSCE and the European institutions, these Jewish groups have overcome governments' reluctance to address the issue and have focused attention particularly on the threats posed by the spillover of Middle East tensions and the anti-Semitic messages promoted by Arab states, their media, and Islamist bodies. The Jewish NGOs aim to encourage the international organizations and European governments to face up to their responsibilities to protect their Jewish citizens, accept that anti-Semitism is different from other forms of discrimination, and begin to monitor and combat the threat through governmental and police action.
Unprecedented Response and Collaboration: Preliminary Lessons from Jewish and Israeli Responses to the Crisis in Ukraine
Date: 2022
Topics: Main Topic: Other, NGOs, Charity / Tzedakah, Refugees, Conflict, Ukraine-Russia war (since 2014)
Abstract: OLAM is a network of Jewish and Israeli organizations working in the fields of global service, international development, and humanitarian aid. Many of OLAM’s partners, alongside other Jewish and Israeli organizations, are on the ground in Ukraine and in adjacent countries providing support and services to those who have been caught up in the war in that region. These organizations include legacy providers of humanitarian aid such as World Jewish Relief (WJR) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC); Jewish engagement organizations catapulted into humanitarian action such as Chabad and Hillel in the Former Soviet Union; and Jewish-led grassroots networks providing personalized help.

This report seeks to draw out preliminary lessons from the Jewish and Israeli efforts that have mobilized in response to this humanitarian emergency. Although the crisis remains ongoing and will likely continue to evolve
over the coming months and years, this report seeks to provide initial insights on how Jewish groups have
collaborated during the first three months of this crisis, and how they can collaborate most effectively in its next
phases. It also seeks to capture wisdom gained through responses to this crisis that can inform how the Jewish
community can respond to future crises in other parts of the world.
The Europeanization of Holocaust Memory and Eastern Europe
Author(s): Kucia, Marek
Date: 2016
Topics: Holocaust, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust Education, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, NGOs, European Union
Abstract: Drawing upon developments in cultural and social memory studies and Europeanization theory, this article examines the Europeanization of Holocaust memory understood as the process of construction, institutionalization, and diffusion of beliefs regarding the Holocaust and norms and rules regarding Holocaust remembrance and education at a transnational, European level since the 1990s and their incorporation in the countries of post-communist Eastern Europe, which is also the area where the Holocaust largely took place. The article identifies the transnational agents of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory—the European Union’s parliament, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, as well as the United Nations. It analyzes chronologically the key Holocaust-related activities and documents of these agents, highlighting East European countries’ varied and changing position towards them. It examines synchronically the outcome of the Europeanization of Holocaust memory by these transnational agents—a European memory of the Holocaust—identifying its key components, discussing the main aspects, and illustrating the impact of this process and outcome upon the memory of the Holocaust in the East European countries. The article argues that the Europeanization of Holocaust memory has significantly contributed to the development of Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe, although other agents and processes were also involved.
Europe’s Undertakings to Combat Antisemitism
Author(s): Whine, Michael
Editor(s): Lange, Armin; Mayerhofer, Kerstin; Porat, Dina; Schiffman, Lawrence H.
Date: 2021
Topics: Antisemitism, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Monitoring, European Union, Law, Policy, NGOs
Hardship And Needs Of Elderly Hesed Clients: An Analysis Of Clients Served By Hesed Service Centers In Russia & Ukraine
Author(s): Tighe, Elizabeth; Magidin de Kramer, Raquel; Bleckman, Dina; Begli, Nursahedov; Saxe, Leonard
Date: 2012
Topics: Ageing and the Elderly, Care and Welfare, Health, Evaluation, Main Topic: Other, Social Services, Social Work, NGOs
Abstract:

The countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) are the home today for a substantial number of Jews, many of whom live in poor, economically disadvantaged communities. Throughout the FSU, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) has supported the development of Hesed welfare and Jewish community centers to assist in the provision of services to Jews in need and to support the renewal of Jewish life after years of suppression. The present report is designed to review the current economic, health, and social conditions of these elderly Jews in need in the FSU and to compare their circumstances, as best possible, to their counterparts who live in western countries such as the United States.

Data from a large number of sources are reviewed and analyzed, including national statistics, national and local surveys, and client-level data. The data indicate clearly that, in view of demographic composition, as well as economic and social conditions, elderly Jews in the FSU have tremendous needs for supportive services funded by philanthropy compared to their peers in the United States. The comparisons also highlight the disparities in available care among those most in need.

There is a clear need for external support for basic health and social services for elderly Jews in the FSU. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is not an adequate safety net for the elderly. The situation is in flux and there are unique challenges associated with understanding service delivery in societies that are in transition. The available data on pensions and living circumstances make clear that the economic situation for elderly in the FSU who seek Hesed services is dire. Faced with increasing costs for basic needs such as utilities and food, along with health services including essential medicines, quality care and homecare, the pension amounts that Hesed clients rely on are inadequate to meet their needs.
Renewal: Reconnecting Soviet Jewry to the Soviet People. A Decade of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) Activities in the Former Soviet Union 1988-1998
Author(s): Weiner, Anita
Date: 2003
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Jewish Organisations, Post-1989, International Aid, NGOs, Poverty, Care and Welfare
Abstract: Seven decades of severe Soviet cultural-religious suppression and two world wars had isolated and demolished the once flourishing Jewish communities behind the Iron Curtain. When the era of Glasnost and Perestroika presented an opportunity for world Jewry to reestablish its lost ties with the three of four million Jews still living throughout the former Soviet Republics, it was unknown whether there was any hope for some kind of Jewish community renewal. The story of how the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a voluntary, humanitarian organization supported by American Jewry, made its entry into the isolated, poverty-stricken world, is a dramatic one. Beginning with only a few highly motivated and experienced workers, contact was made through music, literature, food packages, and religious holiday celebrations. Local Jewish leadership emerged and was encouraged. Plans for community development through social, religious, educational and welfare services were made and implemented. With the guidance of AJJDC and its dedicated community workers came rehabilitation and renewal.