Lifestyle

from The Jewish Light Election 2021 Issue

Jewish Life

Nearly 1 In 3 Israeli Jews Will Be Haredi Orthodox By 2050, Per Israeli Economic Projections

By Shira Hanau

Hared Orthodox Jewish men walk near the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, Jun. 17, 2021. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

(JTA) — Nearly one third of Israel’s Jewish population will be haredi Orthodox by the year 2050, according to projections by Israel’s National Economic Council.

Israel’s current population of 9.2 million is expected to grow to 16 million by 2050. Of those 16 million, about a quarter are projected by Israel’s National Economic Council to be haredi Orthodox, Haaretz reported Monday.

The new population figures point to a future in which Israel’s Jewish population continues to make up about 80% of its population but in which that Jewish population skews far more heavily Orthodox than ever before. Currently, Israel’s Orthodox population makes up 12.6% of the population. By 2050, that figure will rise to 24% of the total population, the council claims.

Most of that growth will result from the Orthodox community’s birth rate of 6.7 children per woman, far higher than the rate of 3.01 among the population as a whole. Across all sectors of the population, Israelis ages 19 and younger will make up over a third of the population.

Most of Israel’s Orthodox Jews are expected to remain concentrated in Jerusalem and its surrounding area as well as in the city of Beit Shemesh. But the Orthodox population is also projected to grow in Israel’s south, where a new Orthodox city is being planned, as well as to a smaller degree in the north.

Tel Aviv and its surrounding cities and suburbs will continue to be the most highly populated area of the country. That area will also see a major increase in the number of elderly people, with the number of people over the age of 65 approximately doubling.

The country’s population growth across all sectors is projected to place greater demands on the country’s housing stock, already considered to be insufficient for the current population’s needs, as well as transportation systems and education system.ì lect the data by gathering media reports and by carrying out an informal survey, according to Rabbi Motti Seligson, a Chabad spokesperson.

The survey turned up a number of capital projects that have not yet been publicly announced, including some purchases that are underway now. Seligson said the true extent of Chabad’s recent real estate expansion is likely much larger than the $137 million figure indicates.

But he said he wanted to release the information he had in conjunction with the 38th annual International Conference of ChabadLubavitch Emissaries, which takes place this week in-person in and around Brooklyn, New York. as well as virtually.

“We were doing an exploration of Chabad’s impact and growth to examine the effectiveness of various programs through this difficult time of the pandemic,” he said. “These numbers came into sharp focus as we looked at the level of engagement and our institutional and infrastructure growth.”

Seligson also pointed out that during the pandemic, Chabad minted 250 new emissary couples who went out to serve existing Chabad centers or establish new ones.

Even before the pandemic growth spurt, Chabad had already engaged some 37% of American Jewish adults in activities, according to recent survey data from the Pew Research Center.

Over the past 20 years, the number of Chabad synagogues in the United States has nearly tripled, reaching 1,036 in 2020, according to a tally by Joel Kotkin, a Chapman University professor who studies demographic trends, and independent researcher Edward Heyman. Over that same period, the overall number of synagogues declined by 29%.

“While their secular counterparts are shrinking, the Hasidim and other more traditionally observant Jewish communities in America are experiencing a surge of growth,” Kotkin and Heyman wrote in a Tablet magazine article analyzing their data.

While many Hasidic groups are growing primarily through procreation, Chabad, focused as it is on outreach, appears to be picking up a significant chunk of the Jews who have disaffiliated from the Reform or Conservative movements or who have never had much of an institutional affiliation to begin with. In its recent survey, Pew estimated that among Chabad participants, 24% are Orthodox, while 26% are Reform, 27% are Conservative, and 16% don’t identify with any particular branch of Judaism.

“In the present the core social needs of the Jewish world are filled by two kinds of organizations: One is Chabad, which is expanding rapidly and offers a full gamut of services,” Kotkin and Heyman wrote. (The other kind of organization is the local Jewish federation and its affiliated Jewish community centers.)

As Chabad proliferates, it is finding among the Jews it serves many willing donors. Sometimes, individual contributors like the Preisses in Chicago play an outsized role, but their gift was accompanied by $500,000 in small donations, according to Chabad.org.

In comments to Chabad.org, the Preisses explained why they gave to Chabad. “They focus on each mitzvah without criticizing. They’re so welcoming,” said Jacques Preis, who was raised Reform. “It’s not a diluted Judaism,” said Evelyn, his wife.

“Much of the funding for these campaigns is raised locally from people whose lives are personally enriched by Chabad in their community,” Seligson said. “They represent people from large donors to large numbers of small donors like college students who are committed to supporting Jewish life and programs that inspire them with whatever they can based on their means.”ì

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PANDEMIC

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GEN-Z JEWS

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But are Jews really so different from their counterparts in other religious groups? Springtide’s poll questions about “faith life” and “faith community” may not have captured the modes of religious engagement that are present for Gen-Z Jews, or their parents, said Ronit Stahl, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies recent history and is involved in the university’s Center for the Study of Religion and Center for Jewish Studies.

“It strikes me as very Christian language,” Stahl said. “If you ask young Jews about their relationship with the Jewish community, you’ll get a very different answer than if you asked about their relationship with their faith community, because Jews typically don’t talk about Jewish life as being part of a faith community.”

Surveys about Jewish engagement and attitudes more traditionally focus on measures that are less open to interpretation, such as synagogue affiliation and frequency of various practices. That is the case with the surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, the latest of which focused on Jews was released earlier this year and also found evidence of declining institutional engagement among younger Jews. Pew conducts similar surveys of Christians, as well, and regularly releases surveys of attitudes across religious groups that are broadly trusted by American Jews.

Springtide is trying to do something different from what Pew does. According to Packard, Springtide is hoping to understand and support young people as they “explore life’s biggest questions” like “Why am I here? How should I live? What happens when I die?”

Founded in 2019, Springtide operates under the fiscal structure of a Catholic nonprofit publishing company called Lasallian Educational and Research Initiatives but the two entities are independent, with Springtide pledging to study young people from a nonsectarian perspective.

Packard acknowledged the difficulties in developing poll language about spirituality that can be universal but said the survey asked questions in multiple ways to capture different perspectives. He also noted that Springtide relies on an advisory board with representatives of many traditions including Judaism.

“Even with all of this in place, it’s tricky to try and find language and concepts that are accessible to young people broadly speaking,” Packard said. “Language that makes sense to young Muslims will not always resonate with Christians or Jews and the nearly 40% of young people who are unaffiliated might not understand much religious language at all.”

He said this team is open to adjusting its survey methods and added that, next year, Springtide hopes to carry out a national study focused entirely on young Jews.

If it does, other measures suggest that it might well draw some similar conclusions.

Flory, the University of Southern California sociologist, said Springtide’s findings match what’s already well known in his field. He was referring to the work of the National Study of Youth and Religion out of the University of Notre Dame and to his own book published last year, “Back-Pocket God: Religion and Spirituality in the Lives of Emerging Adults,” which is based on a decade of research.

“There’s no surprise in any of the data that younger people across the board are moving away from institutionalized religion,” Flory said. “I can tell you the groups that are not doing well: Jews, mainline Protestants and Catholics. They’re doing the worst.”

The suite of Jewish organizations seeking to engage Jewish teens and young adults is large and diverse, ranging from legacy institutions with a presence on college campuses like Hillel and Chabad, to the newer models like the fastgrowing world of Moishe House with its global network of homes-as-community-centers, and startups such as GatherDC, which just got a $1.5 million grant to take its work on something called “relational Judaism” national.

Leaders of several Jewish organizations who reviewed the Springtide numbers said they weren’t sure how seriously they should treat the data, and expressed optimism on the outlook of engaging young Jews.

David Cygielman, the CEO of Moishe House, for example, saw a glass half-full when he read that 41% percent of Jewish respondents are not flourishing in their faith lives. It meant that 59% were.

“As we’re looking out into the future, and investing in this demographic, we’re not starting with a minority here, we’re starting with the majority that we want to see grow,” he said.

And from Chabad’s perspective, the numbers don’t exactly reflect the interest they are seeing at colleges.

“We’re seeing a surge of young Jews on campus clamoring for community, Jewish life and engagement,” said Rabbi Yossy Gordon, CEO of Chabad on Campus International. “They are looking for meaningful ways to build their own authentic Jewish identity.”

But some in the Jewish world said they found Springtide’s approach refreshing and thought the findings should be seen as relevant to American Jews. Josh Feigelson, a rabbi who leads the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, says the fact that poll language about faith and spirituality is seen as out of step with Jewish culture is in fact a problem for young Jews.

“For a lot of reasons the American Jewish community has shunned overt spiritual language,” Feigelson said. “We don’t talk about the presence of God in our lives or offer words of blessing to each other in a non-self conscious way. There’s a correlation there with a feeling of estrangement that doesn’t surprise me.”

As an applied sociologist, Tobin Belzer conducts research and evaluations on behalf of numerous organizations and philanthropists across the Jewish world. Her findings, based on several studies of Jewish young adults’ perspectives and experiences, suggest that this demographic isn’t hopelessly estranged. “Young adults aren’t necessarily interested in rabbis who act like a ‘sage on the stage,’” she said. “They want someone who is real and approachable and authentic, who is going to have an actual relationship with them. Also, they’re not typically looking for the one community where they can engage fully, they are looking for a smattering of different options.”ì

YOUNG IMMIGRANT

Continued from Page 8 and she ended up staying on after completing her degree in 2017.

By January 2020, Schwarzbard had worked her way up to her current position, where she’s also a deputy to the head of digital diplomacy.

Schwarzbard credits the Hebrew language education she received at Brooklyn’s Shulamith School for Girls for putting her in a good stead upon her arrival in Israel. She only needed one semester of ulpan, an intensive Hebrew course, to get up to speed.

“I threw myself into Hebrew and Israeli culture. It was sink or swim,” she recalls. “Sometimes I make mistakes, but I laugh it off. It’s the only way to learn. I even spoke in Hebrew on a TV morning show!”

Despite Schwarzbard’s positive attitude, she doesn’t shrug off the challenges of aliyah. She credits Nefesh B’Nefesh with helping her and other new immigrants navigate Israel’s bureaucracy. After the pandemic arrived, Schwarzbard was forced to go a year and a half without seeing her parents, brother or other relatives back in the United States.

But she also found herself at her most creative during the pandemic. She launched the Foreign Ministry’s TikTok account, which accrued 146,000 followers in just six months.

With social media taking up so much of her time and energy during the day, Schwarzbard makes a concerted effort to turn off her computer and silence her phone in the evenings. She has also limited her personal social media presence to Twitter and LinkedIn.

When not working, Schwarzbard likes to run in Jerusalem’s Sacher Park and read historical nonfiction. She’s acquired a sizable circle of friends — both native Israelis and immigrants.

“I have a hybrid social circle,” she said, “but I would have to say that my closest friends are Israelis I met here, including fellow former students, roommates, and colleagues from work. It is important to break out of the American olim bubble.”

Although Schwarzbard tries to separate work from personal time, the reality of her job is that she is on call 24 hours a day, six days a week (seven days a week in times of national crisis).

She says she doesn’t mind, because she knows she is making a broad and significant impact. She loves to engage with people, creating relationships and opportunities for dialogue. She especially likes it when she can leverage other olim in her work.

She encourages other young people to consider making Israel their home, despite the challenges.

“Israel is a land of opportunity. You can really make a difference and leverage the skills you have from growing up abroad,” she said. “You can make it to the top of your field here.”

Networking, she says, is key. “That is why I always respond to other immigrants who reach out to me on LinkedIn.”

Schwarzbard rejects the Hebrew description of what she does as “hasbara,” which she says connotes propaganda.

“What we do is public diplomacy. There is nothing we need to justify or be defensive about,” she said. “What we do is tell Israel’s story and prepare for the future. We engage, create relationships, and respond.”

Schwarzbard says her goal is to share what she herself has discovered since making aliyah: “Israel is a normal country. It is perfectly imperfect, and it is far more than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is a complex place, and our stories are similar and relevant to those of other places around the world.”

This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with Nefesh B’Nefesh, which in cooperation with Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah, The Jewish Agency, KKL and JNF-USA is minimizing the professional, logistical and social obstacles of aliyah, and has brought over 65,000 olim from North America and the United Kingdom for nearly two decades. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.ì