Shouldn’t Torah Jews be smarter than this?
A few weeks ago Rabbi Moshe Grylak wrote a piece entitled “Tragedy in London” on the rapid assimilation of the Israeli Jewish community in London. Subsequently I viewed a snippet of a meeting between a figure in the Israeli embassy in London and a group of communal askanim discussing that disturbing phenomenon.
The consular representative expressed her dismay that so many Israelis have lost any connection to the Jewish calendar even Yom Kippur just as Rabbi Grylak wrote. To its credit the Israeli embassy uses social media and any other means at their disposal to remind expat Israelis in London of the Hebrew calendar and the holidays and yet she said it’s often not enough.
At the same meeting another major communal askan who grew up in Israel commented that only five percent of Israeli families send their children to any form of Jewish school whereas the figure for the general community is well over half at the elementary school level.
As Rabbi Grylak wrote all this is a tragedy. But there is another side of the story that Rabbi Grylak did not address. Most of the tens of thousands of Israeli Jews currently living in London are living in northwest London which is where most of the Orthodox community also lives. And yet there is almost no interaction between the Jews from Israel and the established Anglo community.
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