Itongadol.- After thanking the organizational leaders of American Jewry for their contributions to Israel over the years, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said on Tuesday it was time for Israel to open up its pocketbook to help keep Diaspora Jews from assimilating into oblivion.
“The annual budget of the State of Israel stands at over $100 billion,” Liberman said to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations annual Israel mission. “I believe that the Israeli government should contribute $1 million for every day in the calendar year, making a total of $365 million."
With this speech focused on what he said was "Jewish continuity," Liberman defied expectations that he would use the address — in English and open to the press — to discuss the Palestinian negotiations and further burnish his image as a national leader who is moderating his positions.
Stating that Jewish education was the most pressing issue on the global Jewish agenda, more so than Iran or the Palestinian negotiations, he said the Israeli government funds should be matched by Diaspora funds to create a global network of Jewish schools that would be affordable and teach Jewish history, values, traditions, Israel and Zionism.
Quoting the recent Pew Surveys findings, including that intermarriage in the US has reached 58%, Liberman said “these statistics demonstrate that the Jews of America are facing nothing less than a demographic catastrophe.” He said that it was time for Diaspora leadership to “concentrate on the challenges facing your own communities, especially those emanating from the dangerous trends in the Jewish community demonstrated in the recent survey.”
Liberman said that the antidote to rising assimilation, intermarriage and disengagement from the Jewish community was education.
Liberman said that on a recent trip to New York he met a Russian Jewish family in Brooklyn with three children who said they did not send their kids to Jewish schools because to do so would cost $100,000 a year. He said that situation is replicated in Jewish communities across the globe.
“If this situation persists, we will lose another six million Jews in a generation or two,” he warned.
“Jewish children are being kept from the Jewish classrooms because of the exorbitant and prohibitive costs of Jewish education in the US,” he said. “It cannot be, it should not be, that a Jewish child will not be able to receive a good Jewish education because of financial reasons. This should be unacceptable to all of us who care for the Jewish future.”
Liberman said this project “needs to be the central point of partnership between us,” and that the budget will be found: “It is just a matter of prioritizing Jewish education above all other issues.”
In addition to creating an international network of Jewish schools, Liberman said he had an additional goal of bringing an additional 3.5 million Jews from the Diaspora on aliya in the next decade to boost the Jewish population here to more than 10 million.
“Education and aliya have to become the most important goals of the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora,” he said, receiving a standing ovation for his comments.