ABSTRACT
WELCOMING the contribution on Jewish education, Dr. Esh felt that the authors had dealt almost exclusively with one aspect of the educational field. ‘The picture that emerges from their very competent analysis is that a lot is done in this country for instruction in Jewish knowledge; as regards Jewish “education” in the particular sense referred to, namely, transmission of Jewish values and creating a Jewish atmosphere, it remains an open question, at least for me, if much is done in this respect. It seems that British Jews have arrived at quite a considerable degree of administrative efficiency in the field of Jewish instruction. That this well organized educational effort does not include all Jewish children of school age is duly stressed in the paper itself. The statisticians among us might be rather sceptical about the information regarding the percentage given by the authors of children receiving some Jewish instruction at all (they assume it to be 75-80 per cent). The question, as I see it, is that, of these, almost 30 per cent seem not to reach, let alone retain a working knowledge of even reading Hebrew. If this assumption is right, then we arrive at the rather sad conclusion that about half of the growing Jewish generation will be unable to take any active part in Jewish religious life, and it is difficult to see how this half of the future community can be retained as an integral part of our community. For them religious identification will be void of any content, nor will there be a substitute for it, conceivable at least in theory, namely by way of “group identification” based on secular Jewish nationalism.
