Spotlight on European Jewish Communities
A Visit to Riga, Latvia
This past weekend (Friday April 27th) I arrived in Riga with Nadia, my wife, in advance of theWestbury annual meeting which is taking place as I write this blog. The Jewish Agency has joined the Westbury group over this past year and this was to be my first meeting representing the Agency. It is also my first time in Riga, despite a decade as DG of the
Education Department of the Jewish Agency. With considerable Agency involvement in the Baltics, it was certainly time that I became more familiar with the Latvian community. Little did I know that this visit would become much more significant than I had imagined.......
As a former South African, I had always known that both of my late father's parents had come from Courland, Latvia as young single immigrants to South Africa at the very end of the 19th Century, but these grandparents had both passed away when I was very young and I had little sense of their formative experiences and connections in Latvia.
So that this meeting gave me an opportunity, already for some years in the back of my mind, to explore and concretize my understandings of their roots. In advance I commissioned a local archivist to provide me with additional information by researching local records. This past Sunday Nadia and I were able to visit Tukums and Sabile, from where the Hoffmann's originated in the 18th Century and then Talsi (Talsen) and Kuldiga (Goldingen) the towns of my grandfather and grandmother. Totally unexpectedly, I was able to find the grave and headstone of my great grandmother and grandfather, buried together in the Talsi cemetery in 1906 and then 1908. A profoundly moving beginning to the Westbury week!
Riga provides a window into the renewal of Jewish life in the Baltics. We have encountered many wonderful, talented, charismatic and committed young Jewish activists who provide the leadership scaffolding for the core components of community: welfare, culture, formal and informal education and Jewish and Hebrew literacy. Our own group case study learning cast many of the issues facing communities like Riga into sharp relief and certainly provided those of us active in the field with much food for thought about our own agendas.
After a couple of decades in this field, I continue to wonder - maybe heretically about whether, beyond the phenomenal activists who are so dedicated and committed, we succeed in crossing a "threshold of intensity" which raises the likelihood of the successful transmission of Jewish culture from one generation to the next. In a given community -and this is true for the most successful of communities worldwide does the individual participant (not the leaders), in his or her individual program or combination of programs over time, benefit from ENOUGH Jewish inputs so as to make a significant difference for his or her Jewish future?
It is very difficult to define, let alone quantify, what such a cumulative threshold of Jewish intensity looks like. Most of the activists we meet clearly have crossed the threshold. But does the average young person experience, even cumulatively across multiple initiatives, enough intensity of Jewish life to reach such a point? Riga gave me pause only because it served to remind me how this issue affects to much of Jewish interventions both in the most and the least developed communities.
Alan D. Hoffmann
Director-General, Jewish Agency for Israel
