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From: R. Halevi
Subject: Formative experiences
Date: 17 Elul 5783
I appreciate R. Nachmani's proposal, but I want to note something.
Every example so far has been post-war, and most have been American or Israeli. What about formative experiences from other times and places?
In Tehran, before the revolution, there were Jewish youth organizations. The Otzar HaTorah schools shaped a generation of Persian Jews, taught them Torah alongside Persian literature, gave them a religious identity that was also distinctly Iranian. I knew families in Los Angeles whose children still recited prayers with the Persian pronunciation they learned in those schools, decades after leaving.
Is leaving Iran in 1979 not formative? The families who fled in the revolution, who left everything behind, who rebuilt in Los Angeles or Great Neck or Tel Aviv. This shaped their Judaism as profoundly as any summer camp. More profoundly, perhaps.
And what of the Ethiopian Jews who came through Operation Solomon? The Yemenite Jews who came through Operation Magic Carpet? The Soviet Jews who grew up celebrating Passover in secret? These are formative experiences. They are not American summer camps.
If we are building this category, we should acknowledge that Camp Ramah and Birthright are not the universal Jewish experience. They are recent, geographically specific, and in some ways economically privileged. They are one slice of Jewish formation, not the whole.
—Dov Halevi
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