BUDAPEST — The “Jewish Decade” in Europe is over — now what?
That’s the dilemma European Jews are facing in the 21st century.
During the past year, European Jews grappled both with matters affecting their personal growth and those defining their role in society.
The issues range from Holocaust-era closure to changing relations with Israel, and from pessimistic demographic projections to evolving identities within larger societies in flux.
Also at issue are outbreaks of anti-Semitism, including skinhead violence and a wave of threats and attacks linked to the Palestinian uprising against Israel that erupted last fall.
The issues also include an embrace and promotion of Jewish culture, both as part of a new, multicultural reality and as a way of strengthening Jewish identity.
“We are living an epoch of multiple permutations inside a large Jewish ‘smorgasbord,'” Diana Pinto, a Paris-based scholar, said in remarks prepared for a conference on Jewish identity in the post-Communist era, held in July in Budapest.
“Old categories with which Jewish life in Europe was traditionally described have lost all meaning,” she said. “This is so not because of the seemingly obvious reason, that the Holocaust destroyed ‘European Jewry,’ but for reasons that are connected to postwar developments and in particular to the transformation of Jewish life on the continent since 1989.”
So dramatic have the changes been since the fall of communism and the opening of Europe that Pinto refers to the 1990s as the “Jewish Decade.”
Now European Jews are taking stock and acting in response to new — sometimes radically new — conditions.
Dramatic developments such as the conflict in the Middle East and last year’s overthrow of strongman Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia have left their mark.
There also has been a continuing evolution ranging from the growth of Muslim populations in Europe to the increasing distance from the Holocaust.
Responses to these situations over the past year have included grand gestures. One high-profile example was the General Assembly of the European Council of Jewish Communities, which drew some 700 Jews from 39 countries to Spain in early June.
The assembly was the latest step in efforts to create a unified, pan-European Jewish entity that can take an active part in the formation of a democratic Europe.
But organizers and participants alike recognized that without concrete initiatives and internal funding, the General Assembly’s promise could become mere rhetoric.
Indeed, despite efforts at pan-European action, participants at a seminar for European lay leaders held in Venice in February still defined Jewish life in Europe as “parochial and provincial.”
The Madrid meeting took place at the same time as two other international Jewish events that underscored recent trends.
One was a Budapest conference of the International Council of Jewish Women, which demonstrated mounting internal pressures about the status of women.
The other was a conference of female rabbis, cantors and activists held in Berlin that highlighted the growth of Progressive Judaism, as liberal Judaism is known in Europe, where most congregations and Jewish authorities still are Orthodox.
In fact, issues of religion and pluralism increasingly are entering the European Jewish agenda as traditional definitions of Jewishness erode.
Sociological studies from countries including Ukraine, Sweden, Hungary and Britain, presented at the Budapest conference on Jewish identity, indicate that many European Jews feel an ethnic rather than religious Jewish identity.
Demographic surveys, meanwhile, show that the Jewish population in most European countries is aging and declining.
Only Germany’s Jewish population showed visible growth, thanks to immigration from the former Soviet Union.
Experts said that only half of the European Jewish population, if not less, is affiliated with Jewish communal organizations. In most countries, the figure is much lower.
The intermarriage rate, too, is 50 percent or higher in many countries.
“Given the demographic realities, some questions will become central in community life, namely who is a Jew and what to do with mixed marriages,” Alberto Senderey of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee predicted at the Venice seminar for European lay leaders.
Holocaust issues remained prominent amid a growing sense that as living memory of the Shoah fades, the Holocaust is becoming the subject of scholarly research, rather than personal recollection.
Commemorations for Holocaust victims are augmented by attempts to deal with the political and economic consequences of the Shoah, nationally and individually.
That has taken many forms, ranging from property restitution and slave labor compensation to recognition of the Holocaust as part of general European history, not a separate “Jewish matter.”
In June, after legal challenges were put to rest, a $5.2 billion German government and industry fund started paying compensation to hundreds of thousands of Nazi-era slave and forced laborers.
Jewish culture, too, has found a place in the mainstream, with hundreds of concerts, festivals, performances, exhibits and other events across the continent aiming both at Jewish markets and the general public.
In Poland, the year saw a wrenching national debate over Poles’ role in the Holocaust, sparked by a book revealing that the Jews of the village of Jedwabne were brutally massacred by their Polish neighbors, not by German Nazis.
The debate culminated in a cathartic ceremony in Jedwabne on July 10, the 60th anniversary of the massacre, at which Poland’s president asked forgiveness for the slaughter.
At the same time, Jewish cultural festivals were staged for mainly non-Jewish audiences in at least four Polish cities, and numerous other Jewish cultural events took place.
“The remarkable characteristic of anything to do with Jews in Poland is its intensity,” British Jewish scholar Jonathan Webber said. “Poles are examining themselves when they examine Jewish issues.”
Israel continues to remain central to Jewish thinking in Europe but, as one scholar put it, Israel is no longer the “principal glue” holding European Jewish communities together.