"Abba Eban:" "These Jews were survivors of the Holocaust, refugees, displaced persons." "Behind them lay the smoking and blood-soaked ruins of Europe and the devastation of their lives." "Behind them lay 6 million of their relatives and family, their friends and neighbors, murdered." "For over a century, they had assimilated and adapted." "They had struggled for their traditions, for the right to be different." "they had believed in the possibilities of the brotherhood of man." "But now, after the second world war, for the remnant of European Jewries and other threatened Jewish communities, the overwhelming hope was for a place of safety, a secure home." "[passengers singing hatikvah]" "They hoped to live normal lives, to raise families, and to live in peace." "Some had found refuge in the Americas and in Australia, but most looked elsewhere, to a small land with great meaning in their history- to Palestine, the ancient homeland of their people." "Palestine." "for centuries, this had been a remote and desolate corner of the ottoman Turkish empire with only a small Jewish community." "Then in the late 19th and early 20th century, this land saw the arrival of a new breed of Jewish settler." "They were young and idealistic, from Russia and the countries of eastern Europe." "They came to establish agrarian settlements, to start what they dreamed would become a new Jewish nation." "They called themselves Zionists." "They numbered more than 80,000 by 1914 when the first world war broke out in Europe." "[gunfire]" "The Turkish empire, an ally of Germany, came under attack from allied forces." "It collapsed, and British and French troops moved into the Middle East promising independence to its various regions." "Palestine fell under British rule while its Arab and Jewish populations each waited to be given control of the land." "In 1917, Britain had issued a document- the Balfour declaration- promising support for a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people." "This promise raised the hopes of Zionists everywhere." "In the 1920s," "Jewish immigration increased, in part because of the new opportunities in Palestine, in part because of the worsening conditions for Jews in eastern Europe." "On a greater scale than ever before, the Jewish community remade the land, clearing fields, draining swamps, building cities." "By 1929, the Jewish community had reached 160,000, 20% of the total population of Palestine." "In the 1930s, Jewish towns were growing steadily" "Tel Aviv was already a metropolis- and Jewish immigration was fast increasing as tens of thousands arrived each year fleeing Nazi power in Europe." "In the Middle East, France and Britain had recently created new Arab states" "Iraq, Lebanon, Syria." "The Arabs of Palestine were now growing restless, frustrated by continuing British rule, angered by continuing Jewish immigration." "In the thirties, there were riots and sporadic outbreaks of violence against both the Jews and the British authorities." "But the conflict in Palestine was about to be engulfed by a coming universal conflagration." "The second world war brought a half-decade of horror and devastation." "In Europe, millions were homeless." "3/4 of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had been massacred." "For the Jews of Germany, Austria, and Poland in particular, home now seemed the abode of murderers." "At Kielce, in Poland, in 1946, there was a further anti-semitic outbreak." "43 Jews were killed by a mob." "In Palestine, Jews demanded that a safe haven be made there for the survivors of the Holocaust..." "But the British refused." "They continued to limit immigration severely, hoping to achieve good relations with the Arab world and protect their influence in the Middle East." "The Jews, however, were determined to increase immigration in defiance of British authority." "In secret, often in the dark of night, displaced and homeless Jew were brought to small ports all over the Mediterranean, crammed onto boats- old and barely seaworthy- to sail for the forbidden shore of Palestine." "Man:" "There were 2,000 of us on a boat built for 400." "Many of us were sick from the crowding, the conditions, and the storms." "Most of the time, we stayed below." "Secrecy was vital as British planes flew overhead." "As we neared the shore, a warship appeared on the horizon." "We had been discovered." "Now the hiding was useless, so we came on deck to breathe." "We knew the British would try to stop us reaching the shore, but we wanted them to know they could not break our spirit." "Eban:" "Some of the refugees eluded the British blockade, but most were captured, their fate once more uncertain." "Man:" "We were told that we were going to be taken on board a ship which will take us to Cyprus." "When we finally sighted that ship in the port of Haifa, it was the greatest feeling of letdown, a feeling of trauma and of uncertainty and, to some extent, of fear." "Many of us came out of concentration camps." "The ship already looked like a concentration camp because the decks were all wired in, caged in, and those of us who were still ashore and watched the others walk into these cages- these were moments of dread and difficulty for us." "Eban:" "While over 50,000 Jews were interned in camps in Cyprus," "Jewish negotiations with the British led nowhere." "International pressure mounted for Britain to change its policy, but to no avail." "In Palestine, the Jews now fought the British by all available means." "In 1946, the king David hotel" "British headquarters in Jerusalem- was bombed." "Throughout the land, bridges were blown up, soldiers were attacked." "The continuing British response was imprisonments, armed searches, harsh penalties." "An apparatus of repression and control was clamped down." "Unable to find a solution, in February 1947, the British government requested the United Nations to intervene." "After months of inquiry and debate, the United Nations General Assembly voted whether to partition Palestine into 2 states- one Jewish, one Arab." "Man:" "Soviet Union... yes." "United Kingdom... abstain." "United States... yes." "Eban:" "Approval of the new plan came from countries both east and west." "Man:" "The resolution of the ad hoc committee for Palestine was adopted by 33 votes," "13 against, 10 abstentions." "[crowd cheering]" "Eban:" "There were to be 2 states occupying the area of Palestine, with Jerusalem an international city." "[people singing]" "Once more, 19 centuries after the destruction of Judea by roman legions, the Jews were to have a land of their own." "[drumming]" "On May 14, 1948, ending an occupation of 30 years and refusing to implement the United Nations partition plan, the British withdrew from Palestine." "[crowd cheering]" "That afternoon in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the national Jewish council, proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine to be called Israel." "It was exactly 3 years, almost to the day, since the end of the war in Europe and the overthrow of the greatest tyranny that had ever oppressed the Jewish people." "for the Jews, it was a miraculous transition from the deepest valley of despair to the fulfillment of their highest hopes." "But the Arabs viewed the U. N. decision as a defeat." "Arab irregulars from Syria and Lebanon, the armies of Egypt and Transjordan, and other Arab forces crossed Palestine's border in arms, rushing to occupy the vacuum created by the British withdrawal." "The Jews now had to take up arms to defend their lives, along with the life of their new state." "with few weapons or supplies, but with determination and discipline, they created a civilian army." "War raged the length and breadth of the land... nowhere more fiercely than in besieged Jerusalem." "It took a year of intense and hard-fought conflicts." "The United Nations plan was destroyed in the flow of battle." "Access to the Old City of Jerusalem was lost." "The city was split, it's holiest places in the hands of Arab forces." "By 1949, Israel emerged victorious, but at great cost" "6,000 dead, 1% of the Jewish population." "For the first time in almost 2,000 years, there was a Jewish state." "And in may 1949, Israel took her place as a member of the United Nations." "By some miracle, it had been successful." "The Jews had been landless, united by the ties of their common history, their shared faith, and the ever-recurring cycles of their religious calendar." "But now a great community had been created in the place which had dominated Jewish history." "These Jews were bound together not just in time, but also in space, in the space of this new state." "And the ancient prayer, "next year in Jerusalem,"" "took on a new meaning, a new significance..." "For Jerusalem was now within reach." "There was a welcoming door, a place of their own, a state whose fundamental law gave every Jew in the world the right to enter." "And they came-more than 500,000 in the first 3 years alone." "By 1951, the Jewish population of Israel had doubled to more than a million." "They came from 42 countries, many-like these Yemenites- from the Arab lands." "For the Yemenites, it seemed a biblical promise fulfilled- to be returned to Israel on the wings of an eagle- though the "eagle" turned out to be a battered DC-6." "Plane after plane laboriously brought out the entire Jewish community of Yemen." "120,000 more were flown in from Iraq." "[man singing]" "For centuries, many Jews had lived scattered throughout Arab lands, their customs and culture very different from their European brethren." "But in Israel, all these Jews were to share a common destiny and a common purpose." "From morocco, Jews brought the celebration of Mimouna, a festival unique to that community marking the end of Passover." "The variety of customs that had developed among the Jews during their 2,000 years of dispersion was now brought together for the first time within the borders of a single land." "For most of those who came, Israel meant more than a refuge." "They hoped to find in it a place of rebirth for the Jewish people, the site of a new Jewish culture." "It was the deepest conviction of David Ben-Gurion," "Israel's first prime minister, that his people would create a new and vital culture as they worked to transform the land." "He made a point of working on the land himself, demonstrating by his labor his belief in a society without privilege." "He wrote..." "Man:" "One could hardly find a revolution that goes deeper than what Zionism wants to do to the life of the Hebrew people." "It is to be a homeland for every Jew who returns there, a homeland that provides equally for all her children." "Eban:" "Ben-Gurion and his wife lie buried here, at the edge of the desert which was at the heart of his vision, near the kibbutz Sde Boker, his last home." "Inspired by the Zionist dream," "Israelis took a neglected countryside remade it." "The kibbutz, a new kind of collective settlement, was one engine of this progress." "A small number of Jews left behind their professions and their experiences of urban life to join in the kibbutzim and other pioneering villages, to follow a new ideal" "While working the land, to participate equally in decisions made for the good of the community and the country as a whole." "Man:" "We were going to a new place." "we were going to build not just a settlement, not just a village, but a new way of life, something different, something better, a place based on equality, on mutual help, another society." "Different man:" "The challenge that brought me to Israel was the very simple challenge- the new country, the Jewish country, the idea of building something from nothing." "the togetherness of the kibbutz appealed to me." "The hardship of the kibbutz appealed to me." "I always liken what we did then to the opening up of the west in the United States." "Eban:" "The kibbutz, with its all-embracing social concerns, was for years a principal source of leaders for Israeli society." "It was a concrete symbol of the Zionist dream." "But the reality of life in Israel was often difficult." "The country itself was beset by enemies on all sides," "Arab states that resented its existence and vowed its destruction." "Sometimes Israel feared it might be engulfed and destroyed." "In 1967, that destruction seemed all too imminent." "In May of that year Egypt demanded that UN forces be withdrawn from Sinai it moved to cut off the Israeli port of Eilat and massed 1,000 tanks and 100,000 troops in Sinai." "For 2 weeks, Israel sought international assistance, but in vain." "Uncertainty and tension gripped the nation." "In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and throughout the country, preparations were made for what seemed to be the inevitable conflict." "[siren]" "When it came, Israel's response to Arab threats was swift and unexpectedly devastating." "In less than a week, Israel was victorious- the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank of Jordan under Israeli control." "On June 7, Israeli soldiers took possession of the old city of Jerusalem to which they had been denied access for 19 years." "[gunfire]" "Now Jews were again able to reach the Western Wall, the Ancient Temple site, to pray before the deeply moving symbol of their origins as a people." "[crowd cheering]" "Around the world, Jews were intensely proud of Israel's victory." "For most communities, the effect was profound." "This was particularly true among the 2 million Jews of the Soviet Union." "One who remembers that moment vividly is Alla Rossineck, who was a high-school student in Moscow at the time." "Rossineck:" "It was for the first time that the word "Jewish" had some positive connection." "And after that, it didn't take me long to learn that there is a Jewish people that live in a Jewish state, that they have a Jewish history and religion and the language, and it is not that I don't belong anywhere," "I do belong." "I have a people, and I have a country." "Eban:" "For the Jews of Russia in 1967, the celebration of Israel's victory was tentative, restrained by their own problems with the Soviet authorities." "50 years under Soviet rule had taken them on a journey between hope and despair." "Red Square, Moscow, in the 1930s." "the communist revolution had brought an end to czarist pogroms and persecutions of the Jews." "The Jews had become prominent in Soviet life." "In politics, science, and in the arts." "The Soviets also encouraged all the cultures of their multinational state, including a secular Yiddish culture." "Shloyme Mikhoels was lionized as the director of the Moscow Yiddish theater in the thirties, where many classics of the Yiddish stage were presented as authentic expressions of proletarian culture." "Yiddish literature of all kinds flourished." "150,000 Jewish children studied in Yiddish at state-sponsored schools." "In the course of the 1930s, however," "Joseph Stalin had turned his government into a system of absolute rule." "Though the purges began almost immediately, it was not until after World War II that Stalin, fearful of disloyalty on all sides, selected the Jews as a major target of his paranoia." "Dozens of Jewish leaders and intellectuals were murdered, including Mikhoels, all on fabricated charges." "Gradually the Soviet Union was crushing the identity of its Jews." "By the 1960s, much of the physical witness of Jewish life had been destroyed, as well." "These images, filmed by Nodar Gingihashvili, document the sense of Soviet Jewish life in those years." "Man:" "It was becoming harder and harder to practice or feel as a Jew, and everything to do with the past and tradition was vanishing." "I knew if I didn't record the scene now, it would soon be too late." "It would all be gone." "In Berdichev, the synagogue had become a stocking factory;" "in Kiev, a movie house;" "in Novorossiysk, it was a sewing shop;" "in Tbilisi, a clubhouse;" "in Lithuania, an office building." "Eban:" "Official hostility to Jewish identity had become a part of government policy." "Within the empire, Jews were one of the few peoples whose culture the Soviets sought to repress." "In the 1970s, as Jewish awareness grew, unofficial quotas excluded Jews from many posts in government, in the army, in medical and scientific institutes." "University admission was restricted." "By the early eighties, it was risky to openly celebrate the Jewish festivals." "Jewish education was effectively forbidden, as were more expressions of Jewish culture." "Those who fought this policy and caught the eyes of the world came to be called refuseniks." "Man:" "In '83, my real trouble started." "I was persecuted as a Hebrew teacher." "They would break into my lessons, try to detain the students, try to confiscate the Hebrew books." "and in '84, by the way, it was a very difficult period for all the Hebrew teachers and all the refuseniks because, if you remember, all the rulers of the then-Soviet Union would die one after another," "and those who were really in control were the KGB." "Eban:" "Yuli Edelstein was arrested in 1983 on trumped-up charges and sent to Siberia for 3 years." "protestors: 1, 2, 3, 4, open up the iron door!" "5, 6, 7, 8, let our people emigrate!" "Eban:" "Dozens of other Jews were sent to jail for seeking exit visas to Israel, eliciting a massive world campaign for their freedom." "Protestors:" "Open up the iron door!" "Edelstein:" "I think that the whole public campaign for the Soviet Jewry all over the world had a lot of effect on the government of the Soviet Union." "Done they always denied but we felt it very well." "Eban:" "Finally, after mounting international pressures in the eighties, at the end of the cold war, the Soviet Union relaxed its policy toward the Jews." "[praying in Hebrew]" "Some chose to reassert their Jewish identity through study and worship in the land of their birth." "Others chose to emigrate to any country that would welcome them." "It was not an easy departure." "The future that beckoned lay in an unfamiliar world far away from one's loved ones." "In an astounding exodus that took less than a decade, more than half a million Jews, including Yuli Edelstein, emigrated to Israel." "If departure had been hard, the arrival was no less difficult." "There were new norms, new practices, a new language, and a new culture." "The arrival of so many immigrants in so small a country had an enormous impact." "[band playing]" "Edelstein:" "The real cultural and social influence of this wave of immigration is still part of the future, meaning that the very question of how we manage to integrate the new immigrants, bring them to the common denominator of the Israeli society," "will more or less define their influence in the coming years." "Eban:" "The massive exodus of Russian Jews continue the movement begun more than a hundred years earlier, which shifted the Jewish population of the world more and more toward 2 main centers" "Israel and the United States." "For the thousands of Jews who settled these streets and tenements of the Lower East Side of New York in the late 19th century," "America was a haven and refuge from persecution." "From Europe, the Jews brought with them a rich mix of responses to the modern world." "While many became at home in the streets and neighborhoods of this country, they continued to feel part of the extended Jewish community." "But the ambition that moved them all was to become Americans." "Like other immigrant groups, they suffered from prejudices." "Occasionally the anti-semitism." "But the troubles seemed to diminish with time." "By the 1950s," "Jews had joined in all walks of American life." "In every way, they gave themselves to and were welcomed by the American world." "In these years, the Jewish community was changing rapidly." "Though before the war," "Jews had lived in urban Jewish neighborhoods like these on the Lower East Side, now many were leaving those places behind." "Their experiences of urban life were receding into memory, into nostalgia even." "So you had a little Middle Eastern enclave here." "It was also a street that the Romanians dominated." "You can't see it now, but most of the cafes- or many of the cafes- were along here on Allen street." "Eban:" "For decades," "Jews have been moving to the suburbs, where the sense of an immediate Jewish world is gone." "they have become part of a larger American community and are freer to pursue their individual lives than Jews have ever been in the history of the Diaspora." "Man:" "All right!" "Run, run!" "That's it!" "run!" "But what would seem an occasion for celebration brings deep and sometimes troubling questions." "Man:" "The major issue that Jews face now is the fear about continuity." "Wherever I go in America, people ask me," ""Will my grandchildren be Jewish?" "Do we have a future?"" "and I ask myself, why suddenly this fear?" "why suddenly this great fear?" "Eban:" "Dr. David Hartman has served as a rabbi in New York and Montreal." "His parents were born in Israel but brought up their family in America." "Hartman:" "For my father, being a Jew was not a choice." "It was part of a framework of a given." "It was an existential fact of his being." "For his child, who grew up in Brownsville playing basketball in the park and living in a pluralistic American society, jewishness was something I had to achieve." "Man:" "As we have greeted Shabbat in our homes, so do we receive it at this family service in the extended home of the Jew, the synagogue." "Eban:" "The Jewish focus for some lies in the synagogue." "Man:" "We would see the world in a new light." "Congregation:" "On this day, we would add the spirit to our lives." "Eban:" "For others, being Jewish also means being involved in education or philanthropy and being active in the wider community." "on New York's Fifth avenue, thousands join a parade marking Israel's independence." "[band playing]" "For many, Israel has become an important factor in the way they define themselves as Jews." "Support for Israel has often involved and energized the community." "But even in Israel itself, questions of identity are arising." "Since the 6-day War," "Israel has continued to grow and change." "It is a state in flux, still defining itself, still debating its future." "In 1948, its Jewish population was 600,000." "today it is over 4 million, and this number continues to grow." "The old pioneering images are disappearing." "As the country changes, as science and industry displace the agrarian beginnings, issues that even a few years ago seemed muted or remote have now taken on an intense importance." "Above all, what does it mean to be a Jewish state, and what does it mean to be Israeli?" "[crowd cheering]" "In Israel, citizenship itself is part of Jewish identity." "Under the Law of Return, every Jew in the world from Europe to Asia and from India to Ethiopia is entitled to settle in Israel." "Yet more than 17% of the state's citizens are Israeli Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, whose families stayed in the country after the war of 1948." "Israeli Arabs have full civil rights." "They are represented by Arab members of parliament." "Some are judges, mayors, officials..." "But there are still unresolved problems and tensions." "These Arabs are citizens of a Jewish state but members of an Arab nation." "Israel's conflicts with its neighbors have always aroused deep soul-searching within this community." "As one has said, "My nation is at war with my state." "There in lies the dilemma. "" "For Palestinian Arabs, the 20th century has been one of painful dislocations." "The founding of Israel had forced many off their land." "Following the 6-day War," "Israel took the West Bank and Gaza, with their large Palestinian populations, beginning over 25 years of uneasy military occupation." "The 1987 uprising of youth in the West Bank was an expression of rage and protest against that continuing occupation." "It was known to the world as the Intifada." "Israel's response was criticized, its population divided." "The Arab-Israeli dispute is about many things, but at its heart is an argument about land, about the claims of 2 peoples to the same territory- areas seen by the Arabs as theirs for centuries and seen by Jews" "as part of their historical and biblical legacy." "At the end of 5 decades, the dispute still continues, with the Israeli response complicated by continuing territorial threats and a fear for its national security." "The memories of the wars with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan still haunt the national consciousness..." "For Israel has paid the price other nations pay for security and independence." "It has its cemeteries of war dead, its day of remembrance." "it has had already many wars, too many wars." "Anwar Sadat:" "Let there be no more wars or bloodshed between Arabs and Israelis." "Let there be no more suffering or denial of rights." "Let there be no more despair or loss of faith." "[applause]" "Eban:" "In 1979, Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt." "In 1993, Israelis and Palestinians finally saw the possibility for a new beginning." "It was called the Oslo agreement and hailed throughout the world." "[band playing]" "Finally, in October 1994, a year after the Palestinian breakthrough," "Israel and Jordan ended nearly 5 decades of enmity." "King Hussein of Jordan:" "No more misery." "No more suspicion." "No more fear." "No more uncertainty of what each day might bring, as has been the case in the past." "Yitzhak Rabin:" "The peace that was born today gives us all the hope that the children born today will never know war between us and their mothers will know no sorrow." "[applause]" "Eban:" "But there is a price for such dreams." "Yitzhak Rabin and Anwar Sadat were assassinated because of their policies." "The shock of Rabin's death left deep scars on Israeli society that have been slow to heal." "The peace process itself uncovered deep division among Israelis and lent fuel to an intensifying debate about the very nature of Israel." "Politicians, religious leaders, and philosophers are wrestling with the issues and confronting what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state." "When you say a Jewish and democratic state, what do you mean, first of all, by Jewish?" "Do you mean that it's only a demographic conception, that nothing will not connect us to our collective memory, historical consciousness, tradition, culture?" "Now, you can divide, easily, society according to the amount of Jewish identity that they would like to accept upon themselves." "[praying in Hebrew]" "Eban: "Here, oh, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. "" "This prayer, said every day, has been passed down from generation to generation." "Many Israelis are religious, many nonobservant." "For years, there was agreement respecting the other's way of life." "Recently the number and political power of the ultra-orthodox have increased, and there have been militant demands for the state to impose a variety of rabbinic laws on its Jewish citizens." "The conflict over the role of religion and state that troubled the Jewish people 2,000 years ago has resurfaced in this struggle between religious and secular worlds." "Hartman:" "There's a crisis in terms of Jewish meaning in this society." "Now, in some way, this indicates something vital- that this country is looking for its soul." "It's looking to find a way to connect itself to its past without, in some way, having to give up the possibilities of a new future." "Eban:" "At the Warsaw ghetto museum in Jerusalem," "Holocaust survivors gather to remember their past, to honor their dead and the bravery of those who resisted." "In Israel, as throughout the world, the Holocaust occupies a unique and defining place in the memory of the Jewish people." "[woman crying]" "[Eban speaks Hebrew]" "Sanctified memory, is one of the keys of Judaism." "It is the light from the past that can illuminate the future." "[children singing in Hebrew]" "Here on this kibbutz in 1984, the community celebrated the harvest festival of Shavuot, a celebration dating back to antiquity." "Those who built the kibbutz saw it as the foundation for the new Israel." "Now their children are leaving, and the hopeful dream of kibbutz is fading." "The certainties of a previous generation are giving way as a different Israel is born." "Age-old assumptions of Jewish life no longer hold." "Man:" "For the last 1,800 years, until the last hundred years, the real issue for Judaism was how to provide powerless people with a sense of power, persecuted people with a sense of nobility, and poverty-stricken people with a sense of affluence." "[man singing in Hebrew]" "Now at the end of the 20th century, the question is, how do you take a people that now has freedom and has affluence and give them meaning in that context?" "* la la la la la la la * [children singing in Hebrew]" "Eban:" "Freedom and acceptance have proved to be a challenge." "As the Jews in the United States have become more American, the meaning of Jewish community has become more diffused." "Children: * la la la la la la la la la la la la la *" "Hartman:" "In America, you join a synagogue for sociological reasons." "You seek some sort of connection to the Jewish community." "I remember, people wanted to join my synagogue not because they were interested in Hartman's philosophy, but because they wanted to meet other Jews." "They wanted to drink schnapps together and have herring after services and just rub shoulders with Jews." "children: * la la la la la la la * [children singing in Hebrew]" "Eban:" "Americans in recent decades have watched their children drift away have from the Jewish children community because of intermarriage and indifference." "Kula:" "Freedom is a challenge to the community." "who you are has to be defined from the inside, not by building a wall and saying, "they're different from me,"" "but by saying, "here's who I am, in the full dimensions, interacting with the world around me. "" "But that's a scary thing to do we have not had to do that in many, many centuries." "[speaking Hebrew]" "May the Lord bless you both and keep you both." "[speaking Hebrew]" "Eban:" "Throughout the world, the core values of Jewish life continue to be reaffirmed and reintegrated." "Mazel tov!" "Mazel tov!" "[applause] [music playing]" "The new generation is dedicated to preserving the cultural and spiritual heritage of their people." "At times, their efforts take dramatically different directions." "[singing in Hebrew]" "For a few, for the Hasidim, the preservation of heritage has brought a radical separation from the surrounding culture." "[singing in Hebrew]" "For most, like the members of this chavurah group, experimenting and questioning in order to create a meaningful Jewish path within modern culture." "In a dramatic break from tradition, women now often share with men the responsibilities of ritual." "Kula:" "Judaism always works best when it has a very wide range of responses to whatever the contemporary enrollment is." "After all, the fundamental document, the classical statement of Judaism, which is the Talmud, is a document in which debate and disagreement is the central organizing category." "And yet everyone's on the same page, people with diametrically opposed views, and it's 75% of the entire document." "Its discussions end with no decision, which means that fundamentally, the future's open." "[congregation singing in Hebrew]" "Eban:" "In this more tolerant, more integrated world," "Jews everywhere have been seeking new and diverse expressions of their Jewish identity." "In the great community of America, in the populous Jewries of France where more than half a million Jews live, in Great Britain with 400,000, in countries from Australia to Brazil," "Jewish life and experience continue in rich and creative variety." "When Herod's temple stood a top this wall of stone 2,000 years ago, the disagreement had excitement of the day foreshadowed not just exile, but also one of the most creative periods in Jewish history." "Today, the long exile is over." "The Jews here in Israel and around the world are building from their cherish memories and long held believes a new course for the Jewish people." "The story of the Jews has an astonishing resonance." "Their strange destiny, their achievements, their suffering, and their vision are an enduring part of civilization, for civilization is the bringing together of the memories and the experiences of all peoples." "We are, all of us, the children of history, and for the enrichment of our world, we must try, each of us, to understand our heritage, to judge it in the light of its highest values," "and to pass it on as a treasure for all mankind." "This is the message of the Jews to the world."