New Article: Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer and the Tikvah Fund Haredi Push
David Shasha
Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer and the Tikvah Fund Haredi Push
Back in October 2017 I wrote an article about The Tikvah Fund and its inroads into the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/hakirah/davidshasha/H3bXuIRSJwY/cZ2UsamUAQAJ
In that article we learned about Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer and his Tikvah Fund values:
https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2017/10/can-ultra-orthodoxy-be-made-conservative/
The Tikvah Fund just sent out a formal fundraising letter from Pfeffer that spells the thing out in more detail:
First, in case you
and I didn’t have the opportunity to meet personally at the Jewish Leadership
Conference last October, let me introduce myself. My name is Yehoshua Pfeffer.
I grew up in England, and after years of Torah study and service on a
rabbinical court I was educated at The Hebrew University and its law school. I
clerked for the Israeli Supreme Court and currently teach several courses at
Hebrew University.
I’m part of the Haredi community in Jerusalem, in which I’ve been involved in
setting up schools, developing institutions for higher education, and in the
field of employment. Today, much of my time is spent working for the Tikvah
Fund, which shares my belief that among the most crucial challenges facing
Israeli society today is the healthy integration of the Haredi community.
Our community now includes some million people, or roughly 10-12% of the entire
Israeli population. This year, 25% of Jewish Israeli first-graders are Haredi.
By any calculation, and with numbers continually growing by about 4% a year,
Haredim will soon become a very large proportion of the Israeli adult
population.
But our growth in numbers is not the challenge. It’s the strength. The
challenge is that fewer than 50% of the men in our community participate in the
Israeli workforce, only 1% of us matriculate in Israeli universities, and
matriculation rates for high schools remain low. Needless to add that service
in the IDF, despite some participation, is extremely low. Dealing with the
economic and social issues related to Haredi integration is a huge priority for
Israel in the 21st Century.
We believe we have a strategy that may be able to turn this challenge into an
opportunity. Our efforts are threefold:
First, a deep
intellectual engagement between Tikvah and Haredi society. Last year Tikvah
launched a weekly Haredi journal of thought called Tzarich Iyun. Its readership
is 70,000 readers monthly and growing. It has garnered some 250,000 unique
readers since inception.
What makes Tzarich Iyun so important is that it publishes on issues not
ordinarily spoken about in Haredi newspapers or magazines—questions regarding
the Haredi work ethic, the use of psychology in Haredi society, the meaning of
the Holocaust, the importance of the Haredi middle class, the problem of sexual
abuse, what to do about Internet and cellphones, and how to deal with high
drop-out rates among Haredi high-school students.
Writing about these and many other issues has sparked the interest of a large
and growing group of Haredi individuals. It has cultivated a new level of
conversation within Haredi society, which we believe is essential for its
continued development. If you are interested in learning more, you can read a
sampling of our essays and ideas in English by clicking here.
Next, our effort to educate and establish Haredi leadership. To prepare the next generation of Haredi leaders, Tikvah has been running seminars for men, and separately for women, over the last four years. These have become our flagship programs, and they’ve already trained some 140 men and women who are interested in becoming leaders in their community and ready to participate in the broader conversation about the future of Israel.
Finally, a commitment to building institutions. By means of modest seed investments, we’ve already been able to establish elite high schools for boys as well as for girls, alongside post-high-school programs that prepare Haredi individuals for their futures (among them a Haredi pre-army academy). This institution-building—providing excellent and rounded education above all—provides students with the requisite tools for effective integration of Haredim into the larger Israeli society, without compromising their commitment to a Haredi way of life.
With that as an
introduction, let me tell you why I’m writing. The greater part of the budget
for these operations is provided by the Tikvah Fund itself. But we need to make
up an additional part of that budget—another $300,000 a year—to accomplish all
that we’re trying to do. We were fortunate to receive a $100,000 matching
donation from George Rohr for 2019. To get this money we have to raise another
$200,000 ourselves. Thus far we’ve raised an additional $130,000, leaving us
just $70,000 short.
The fundraising letter is a perfect example of how Jewish Neo-Conservatism
and Haredi Orthodoxy are coming together, as has been the case in the New Convivencia
alliance between Evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews:
It is all part of the wacky, wild world of Trump and the New Fascism:
As Sephardic Jewish Humanism recedes into an ever-dimmer background, the power of the New Jewish Fascism grows ever-stronger and will certainly have an important role to play in the future of traditional Judaism under the rubric of Ashkenazi hegemony.
David Shasha