Fifth in a series on people and places fostering commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people.

"I've heard the term ‘Jewish peoplehood' very often but never understood what it meant," says Zhanna Beyl, an immigrant from Moscow now living in New York, where she works with Jewish teens from the former Soviet Union. "But I got a feeling for it when a small group of us from Latin America, Poland, India, and the States spontaneously sang the same Jewish musical tunes and talked." The setting of their encounter was the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship program, a unique experiment in global Jewish conversation.

Founded over twenty ago by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the seminars meet twice a year on average and attract around fifty participants in their twenties and thirties. According to Dr. Jerry Hochbaum, the foundation's director and the guiding force behind the seminars, the original intention was to help European Jewish communities rejuvenate their leadership cadre at a time when "there were no young people in the pipeline." Two decades later, applicants from every continent but Antarctica vie for a place in the program.

My own first-hand encounter with a seminar occurred five years ago in Uruguay, where I was invited to lecture. This particular group was drawn mainly from across Latin America, some from tiny Jewish enclaves in Montevideo and La Paz, others from much larger centers in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.  Added to the mix were a sprinkling of North Americans, Western Europeans, and two Jews from Tehran.  Other seminars have been conducted in South Africa, Australia, Sweden, India, and Israel, each affording an opportunity to mix participants from communities of various sizes around the world.

The seven- to ten-day seminars have a two-fold purpose: spurring participants to reflect upon the nature of their own Jewish identity and encouraging them to develop a vision for their particular community.  Mornings are devoted to formal learning with professors and public intellectuals, drawn mainly from institutions in the U.S and Israel, who explore classical Jewish texts in the light of Jewish thought and contemporary issues. Afternoons consist of small-group workshops. Evening sessions feature peer-moderated conversations open only to fellows for the private exchange of information about their experience in their respective home communities. Here and over meals and during free time, relationships are forged across regional boundaries and ideological perspectives.

"Not only are all the denominations represented," notes Jeni Friedman, a Conservative rabbi who helps to staff the seminars, "we also mix Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, those on the Zionist right wing with those on the extreme Diasporist left. They talk things out." What makes this possible is the lack of an overt agenda other than deepening Jewish knowledge and self-understanding. In essence, the program creates a safe setting for candor in which, as Hochbaum says, "The Zionists develop a respect for Diaspora Jews, Reform rabbis discover that Orthodox Jews are also OK."

Though the large majority of invitees have a prior track record of activism in their communities, Goldmann fellows are not pressured to assume leadership roles upon their return home. Yet the program has in fact nurtured just such long-term commitments. A sure testament to its success is that Jewish communities and organizations in places like South Africa and Australia have begun to sponsor their own local mini-fellowship programs in an effort to replicate what the Goldmann seminars have achieved on a wider scale.  

Another testament to success is the degree to which fellows maintain ongoing relationships. Two years after her seminar, Zhanna Beyl reports, she is in regular contact with thirty members of her cohort. Alumni participate in online courses offered by the Memorial Foundation and cheer each other on as they organize Limmud study programs, found Jewish day schools, launch new cultural initiatives, and take on positions of communal responsibility.

To all these accomplishments of the fellowship program, one might add the partial repair of a great historical wrong. Founded with German restitution money meant to compensate for the wanton destruction of Jewish institutions in Europe, the Memorial Foundation has created in this program an extraordinary means of strengthening the bonds uniting Jews and their communities across the globe.