This page contains assemblies that Noam movement workers have delivered in schools, as part of the UJIA JAMS project. Click on these links to read about...

Adam's Assembly to C.L.S.G about Rosh Hashanah

Ben's Assembly to H.A.B.S. on Palestinian Solidarity Day 

Ben's Assembly to H.A.B.S. about Jews in China and India

Katie's Assembly to St. Helens on Anti-semitism

Sarah B & Sarah H's Assembly about Yom Kippur 

Adam's Assembly to CLSG: The significance of Rosh Hashanah

I know I’m here to talk about Rosh Hashanah, but I want to start with Pesach. We read a lot about the four children at Pesach, but I always wonder what happens to them at the rest of the year. I thought maybe we would try and catch up with them at Rosh Hashanah and see what they are up to.

Let’s start with the easy one, what some term the wicked child, but what I will call the ‘unengaged’ child, more commonly known as  the ‘3 day a year’ Jew. This is the person who only comes to shul, to the synagogue 3 times a year, the 2 days of Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur. For them shul is not an enlightening experience. If they go into the service, they will rename the ‘days of awe’ as some refer to this period of the year as the ‘days of bore’. However many will not make it through the door into the sanctuary. They will find people they know, maybe some they haven’t seen for a while, and enrich their social, rather than spiritual life for the morning. Hiding from stewards, security men, and slightly peeved parents.

Then there is the child who does not know how to ask the questions. The child who looks around them with wonderment, but does not really understand the significance of the festival. They interact and notice the world around them. They see the last vestiges of summer. The leaves falling off the trees and the beginning of the winter downpours. They see this and realise it is a time of transition, a time of change, they appreciate that and fall into a contemplative mood.

The third child is what traditionally is called ‘simple’ I feel this is unfair, this is the child who has a wider world view than the others, and tries to put Rosh Hashanah in the context of the larger world. For them this is also a time of great importance. Our tradition tells us that 5770 years ago today the world was created. Even though they may not believe this literally it still has significance. The numbers may differ, but we are still another year on in the life of humanity. They will look at how we have progressed or not. They will look at what they have done and can do over the coming year, and, in the familiar surrounding of their community they may offer up a prayer asking for the strength to make more of an effort this year.

The fourth type of child is the wise child, although I would call them learned, they know all the laws and wish to follow them as closely as possible. They know that this is the moment for t’shuvah, literally returning, but also meaning repentance. The chance for them to attempt to be forgiven for past sins, and recognised for their good deeds. They hope to be inscribed in the ‘book of life’ which closes at the end of Yom Kippur. They will spend this time engaging with acts of tzedakah, because Rambam, the great Jewish thinker of middle ages Spain, said that at this time of year the world hangs in the balance, and it is the duty of every person to think that there has been an equal amount of good and evil in the  past year, and any little thing they do could tip the balance in either direction. That’s why communities and charities use this time of year for a major fundraising drive.

This however is not Pesach. I am making no judgement about the four people. I will not end by telling the wicked child that they will not be saved, nor will I schlep nachas over the wise one. Instead they all have the same message.

On Rosh Hashanah they will all hear the shofar. The sound is distinctive, and cannot be mistaken, whether you are following every note sitting in shul, or sitting under a window outside as the sound pierces your surroundings and reminds you where you are. What the Shofar is, according to Rambam, is a wake up call. ‘Wake up sleepers from your sleep’ it cries.

The shofar is the sound of freedom. It is a reminder that we ourselves are free. Free to make our own choices, free to choose our path. At this stage in your lives many of you have made decisions about your futures, whether they are which subjects you are studying, or what university you want to go to. Many people around you, parents and teachers for example will influence these decisions, for better or for worse. These are important choices and you should think about them. But they are not set in stone, your life will not be unalterably changed by these decisions. I for example, trained as an engineer and now am a youth worker.

What you can choose though is who you want to be. Are you going to be person who gives of themselves and their time in aid of a worthy cause. Will you treat all those around you with respect. Will you help others with no reward for yourself. All these are things that you, and only you can decide to do. These are the choices that change lives and worlds, they are the choices that change the world around you for the better.

That is the freedom the shofar signifies. Many people will try to tell you what to be. But no-one can tell you who to be. So wherever you are when you hear the shofar this Rosh Hashanah. Whatever you are doing when you hear it, take it as the reminder that you are free to choose who you are. That is the reflection that Rosh Hashanah should inspire.

I wish for you all to have the strength to make the right decisions for you, and may you all have a happy and healthy new year. Shanah Tova.

Ben's Assembly to H.A.B.S.

The 29^th November is the anniversary of the day the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of The Partition Plan.

The Partition Plan was a UN General Assembly Resolution passed in 1947, declaring that both Jewish and Palestinian states should be set up in what is now Israel, with the territory to be divided between them.

To coincide with that anniversary, the 29^th November has been declared by the UN as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People – a kind of anti-Israel festival: ‘yom Palestine’ maybe.

As a Masorti Jew, I am committed to living a traditional, halachic Jewish lifestyle, whilst also trying to remain in keeping with the modern world. Jewish law, British law and maybe even international law should govern my life and my decisions. I celebrate both the traditional and the modern. With this in mind, if I’m to celebrate minor Jewish festivals: Tu B’shvat (the birthday for trees), the fast of tevet, what about International Days, as mandated by the United Nations, our world government in all but name?

Put another way, how can I, a North West London Jew, working for a Zionist youth movement who feels a connection to Israel, fulfil my obligation to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People? How can I fulfil the mitzvah, as commanded by the UN, to mark this day? This is

Put another – maybe more controversial way – as a person who can not be blind to human suffering wherever, of whomever and caused by whatever, how can I feel solidarity with the Palestinians and still be in some sense ‘pro Israel?’

This is the question I want to look at today.

So let’s delve a little deeper – what does the UN want us to do on the 29th?

According to the UN Division for Palestinian Rights – “The International Day of Solidarity has traditionally provided an opportunity for the international community to focus its attention on the fact that the question of Palestine is still unresolved.”

“Activities include, among other things, the issuance of special messages of solidarity with the Palestinian people, the organization of meetings, the dissemination of publications and other information material, and the screening of films.”

This starts to worry me a little, it sounds a bit like campaigning against Israel, not just trying to help a people in need. So I decide to look at how Israelis see the day. Israel’s most popular daily newspaper, Yediot Achronot, says this:

“The UN will hold blatantly anti-Israel events, including movies comparing Israel to the Nazis, and exhibits on the Israeli occupation and Palestinian suffering.”

Blimey. That’s not exactly what I had in mind. International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is starting to sound a bit anti-Israel for me. But even still, even despite what yom Palestine seems to be, can one still attempt to be a Zionist who feel solidarity with the Palestinians?

Let’s try to answer this as unpoliticallly and uncontroversially as we can.

Most of us would probably agree that there should be a Palestinian state.

We probably all agree that there are some human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories.

The differences between us tend to be matters of extent – how big should the Palestinian state be? How big are the rights abuses being committed? Even the most right wing would surely agree that there are Palestinians who have been unjustly caught in the cross-fire, and even the most left wing have to acknowledge that innocent Israelis have also suffered. However radical some of us may be, and however much it seems that our views are incompatible and complete opposites, there still seems to be some overlap. The separate narratives of the conflict as told by Israelis and Palestinians do seem to both share something – in the middle, however grudgingly it may be, most people accept that the other side is suffering.

The naming of the UN day: An International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, is very pointed. It is not Palestinian solidarity day, or Palestine day. It does not speak of governments or leadership, but of the man in the street – it asks us to feel solidarity with the Palestinian people.

On facebook, if you do a search of groups with ‘anti-Israel’ in the title, you get hundreds of hits, so too for ‘pro-Israel,’ and even more for ‘anti-Israel’ if you misspell Israel. But type in ‘anti-Israeli’ or ‘anti-Palestinian’ and you get far fewer hits. We may be angered by governments or policies, and many of us are taught to do so from a young age, but how many of us can really say that we feel nothing for a people in distress, whether Israeli or Palestinian? I think very few.

In his thoughts on the portion of Torah that we read this week, the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue mentions something that happens in Deuteronomy:

"Do not hate an Edomite, for he is your brother," God commands the Jewish people. "You are about to pass through the territory of your brothers’ descendants. They will be afraid of you, but be very careful. Do not provoke them to war, for I will not give you any of their land, not even enough to put your foot on. I have given this land to Esau.”

The great Religious Zionist, Rav Cook comments on this verse: “just as in the Torah, Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Ishmael, were eventually reconciled, so will Judaism, Christianity and Islam be in future. They would not cease to be different, but they would learn to respect one another.”

I am not standing here asking you all to forget your politics, heel the world, embrace peace and love, and we’ll all hold hands. As nice as that would be, it’s not really my point. What I’m trying to suggest is that whatever our perspective, we should try to feel some solidarity for the other side, it’s only human and stops us demonising the other. The UN’s idea of solidarity may be a little one sided – last year the event sported a map of the Middle East with Israel conspicuously absent – but ours doesn’t have to be.

For all those anti-Zionist Israel haters out there, try to imagine what it feels like to be a resident of Sderot and have to play ‘dodge the rockets’ on a daily basis. For the Israel lobby, imagine returning from a work to find your house had been destroyed because your neighbour, who you never met, was a wanted man.

Maybe the answer is a facebook group – ‘Zionists for Palestine.’ I bet you we’d be the first with a name like that.

I challenge you guys to feel no solidarity whatsoever with the people I have just mentioned. And, if you can feel something, maybe you have fulfilled your obligation to observe the 29^th November.

Ben Russell, 29th November 2008

Assembly to H.A.B.S. about Jews in China and India

I have been asked to talk about the Jews of Asia, specifically the Jews of India & China. At first, I encountered an obvious problem – there aren’t really any Jews in Asia. There are approximately two billion people in the whole of East Asia, from the Chinese-Russian border to Singapore and Hawaii. In all of that vast area, there are no more than five permanent Jewish communities, with a total of less than 2,000 Jews among them. That’s 2,000 Jews out of 2 billion, and those 2,000 Jews aren’t even very interesting – most of them are Israeli businessmen or ultra-orthodox guys running activities for Jewish tourists.

But then I found out that you actually wanted me to talk about the history of the Jews of India and China, a much more interesting topic. The problem here, is that until last week, I knew as much about the Jews of China and India as Didier Drogba knows about sportsmanship.

As I started to read more and more about the topic though, I did discover something of note. It was one specific thing that continually stuck out to me. That one thing isn’t a detail or date, however amazing some of the facts and figure may be. What stuck out to me wasn’t that Jewish settlers have been in China for the last 1,400 years and not that their existence was unknown for almost 1,200 years. It wasn’t that a Rabbi from Kaifeng in China once became the ruler of an entire region bigger than large parts of Europe. It wasn’t even that one particular Jewish sect in India – the Bene Israel - ended up in Southern Mumbai by mistake because of a shipwreck, and have stayed there ever since.

What stuck out to me was a question: How did these guys stay Jewish? How did they continue their Jewish tradition, marry other Jews and simply be Jewish in the middle of China or India?

I found this quite an amazing idea - Judaism and Jewish practice actually survived in these isolated areas. I assumed that the Judaism practiced by these communities would resemble a centuries old game of Chinese whispers: year on year, decade on decade, as the tradition passed down from generation to generation, largely by word of mouth, I thought it would have drastically changed – the stories would be different, the laws different. Maybe they prayed 4 times a day, or believed in the 11 commandments. But the reality is that the Judaism practiced in the middle of China & India in the 10^th century is entirely recognisable to us today…

In 1163, the Chinese community of Kaifeng looked pretty typical for a Jewish town. It had a synagogue, a study hall, a mikvah, a communal kitchen, a kosher butcher, and even a sukkah. And the similarities don’t stop there. A British traveler in 1843 describes a synagogue in China with:

“An inscription in Hebrew, saying HEAR, O ISRAEL: THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD.”

He reported rabbinical rules for slaughtering, Shabbat and funerals. He found books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings and the Prophets.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that everything they did was the same as us. They had their own different customs & ideas. On Simhat Torah (a festival which falls this Sunday) in the Indian community of Cochin, they invited the town’s non-Jews into the synagogue. They decorated it with lights and Jasmine and built a wooden frame in the shape of a cedar tree, though no one seems to quite know why. The women wore Saris and had bindis on their foreheads. Their wedding rituals were also particularly striking – on the Saturday night before the wedding, the groom was accompanied home from the synagogue by a band and seven young women, who each brought different types of wine. This sounds like quite a fun tradition.

Anyway, this Indian community in Cochin is perhaps an interesting model for us, if we’re looking at how their Judaism survived and what we can learn from it. Like us, the Cochin Jews were assimilated – meaning that they actually lived like local, non-Jewish people in many respects. They had regular job and spoke the local language – their Pesach haggadah was even written in the local language. They had Indian versions of Jewish names and even followed some of the Hindu laws – widows couldn’t remarry, for example, and they even made some ceremonial offerings to Hindu Gods. But, like us as well, they strongly held onto key Jewish laws and customs. Records show that Jews were carrying out ‘brit milah’ – circumcision rituals – in the eleventh century, saying the Shema as well as keeping the laws of Kashrut, Shabbat and Festivals.

It seems that the Jews in these isolated communities decided what traditions they wanted to keep hold of and how much they wanted to assimilate. They held tight to the core Jewish values of Shabbat, eating Kosher food and saying the Shema – Judaism’s key declaration of faith – and they were more liberal with other aspects – they actively invited non-Jews into the synagogue. Maybe this is the answer to my question of how their Judaism survived in such harsh conditions. By actively deciding what to keep hold of and how to assimilate, they created a Judaism that was in accordance with their values and could survive the test of time. They didn’t take the fundamentalist, ultra-Orthodox perspective that, for Judaism to survive, you have to totally ignore the world around you, rigorously follow the letter of every law and stick completely to yourself. They decided to engage with the world around them, whilst keeping hold of Jewish customs – they were both modern and traditional, and, by taking this approach, their Judaism stood the test of time.

This, I think, is an interesting message for us. People are so obsessed with continuing the Jewish tradition and passing it from generation to generation. Parents and grandparents nag us not to go out with non-Jews, many parents force children to go to synagogue, even though they wouldn’t otherwise dream of going themselves, just for the sake of Jewish continuity. Maybe the lesson of the Jews of China & India is that, by coming up with a form of Jewish observance that we are comfortable with and proud to practice; a Jewishness that is both traditional and engages with the modern world; we can further Jewish continuity and live a more fulfilled and happy life. So maybe think, if you and your community were shipwrecked in the middle of a totally different, alien society, what aspects of your Judaism would you keep hold of?

Ben Russell, 8 October 2009 

Katie's Assembly to St. Helens on Anti-semitism 

Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is prejudice against or hostility towards Jews, often rooted in hatred of their ethnic background, culture, or religion

Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways, ranging from individual expressions of hatred and discrimination against individual Jews to organized violent attacks by mobs or even state police or military attacks on entire Jewish communities. Extreme instances of persecution include the First Crusade of 1096, the expulsion from England in 1290, the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the expulsion from Portugal in 1497, various pogroms, and perhaps the most infamous, the Holocaust under Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.

In Nazi occupied Europe, oppressive discrimination of the Jews and denial of basic civil rights, escalated into a campaign of mass murder, culminating, from 1941 to 1945, in genocide: the Holocaust. Eleven million Jews were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, and some six million were eventually killed. This is seen by many as the culmination of generations of antisemitism in Europe.

Show images and the poem 'He was Lucky' and discuss what the images mean what they portray.  How the poem makes them feel?  The title of the poem?

New antisemitism is the concept that a new form of antisemitism has developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, emanating simultaneously from the left, the right, and fundamentalist Islam, and tending to manifest itself as opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel.

The arguments to the concept include:

- new antisemitism is a new phenomenon stemming from a coalition of "leftists, vociferously opposed to the policies of Israel, and right-wing antisemites, committed to the destruction of Israel, [who] were joined by millions of Muslims, including Arabs, who immigrated to Europe ... and who brought with them their hatred of Israel in particular and of Jews in general."

- Antimsemitism but not a new phenomenon

- Opposition to Israel is not antisemitism

Discussion:

- Do you feel affected by antisemitism?

- Do you think it is on the increase or decrease?

- Is there a difference between living in a Jewish area and non-Jewish area?

- Are jokes or stereotypes antisemitic?

Katie Fine, 15 October 2009 

A dialogue of two Sarahs: Sarah H. & Sarah B. speak at  Highate on Yom Kippur

H: Now, Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. It’s the day on which Jews fast and repent for their sins. It’s traditional to not wear leather and to wear the white garments in which we would be buried, to think about our mortality. God remembers everything we’ve done, as it says: “Before you all hidden things are revealed, the multitude of secrets from the beginning. You remember every deed and no creature is concealed from you.”

H. I certainly agree. Shana Tova and Gmar Chatima Tova.