Today’s Teens Will be the Last Jews?

By Roland Roth, 34
Director of Programming, BSKI

"Rosh” Roland Roth recently moved to St. Louis to be the new Director of Programming at Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel (BSKI) where he is responsible for all synagogue programming, including youth groups, family programs, singles/young couples, and more.  He previously  worked for synagogues in Wilmington, Delaware and Seattle, Washington.  Before that he was a public school teacher in New York City.   Roth is passionate about creating positive, comprehensive, quality opportunities for new, connected, and re-connecting people of all ages and backgrounds.

In a way, Hitler had it right:  If Jews remained together in tight-knit communities, they were more likely to retain connections to their collective history, their traditions, and their way of life that had sustained them for millennia. And so the first and most important part of the Final Solution was to take them from their places of comfort and scatter them to far off places, places they had no shorashim, no roots, and no minhag, tradition.

And yet we persevered.

It’s really crazy, when you think about it.  We were plotted against, beaten down, slaughtered, enslaved, and kicked out of our homeland… and yet here we are.

Three thousand years of being persecuted, and yet we’ve survived.  Longer than the greatest of dynasties, the Jewish people have, even through the darkest of times, survived and thrived.

So what’s happening today?  The number of people identifying as Jews has reached a plateau and possibly trends downward.  What does it mean that before the Holocaust there were approximately 18 million Jews in the world and yet, even now, 60 years later, with generations who have grown out of the Shoah’s ashes, we still aren’t back to that number?

I think it’s pretty simple.  I think we’ve screwed ourselves up so seriously that we’re doomed to be a people of history if things don’t change. 

Yes, you read that right.  Today’s Jewish youth will be the last generation of Jews.

Today’s Jewish world sees a disintegration of greater community and a loss of connection between Jews and Jewish institutions (synagogues, community centers, summer camps, social service agencies…).  Donations to Jewish organizations are down.  Hours of Jewish study among adults, teens, and children lessen from one decade to the next.  The rates of interfaith dating, interfaith marriage, and disassociation with the organized Jewish community are up.

Unless we change something, I think you’ll someday relatively soon (in relation to 3000 years of Jewish culture community, & history) recall for your grandchildren what it was like to be part of something bigger than your Jewish self: that you were part of the Jewish world.

Unless, of course, things change.  If we commit to learning more about our collective past, our collective traditions, our collective language and land, and our collective people—maybe we can fight the tide of assimilation and silence that is quietly pulling the wool of history over our eyes.

It’s pretty simple.  It starts with you.  It starts with today.  It’s time to connect.  Otherwise the naysayers and those who have plotted our destruction and demise will win.  And we’ve got too much good to let that happen.

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Simone Bernstein