We never call them remnants. Because remnants do not go to Jewish day schools.

We never call them dying Jewish communities. Because dying Jewish communities do not have sites on the World Wide Web.

And we never call them the last Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. Because of all of the creatures that God has created, a last Jew is simply not one of them.

At The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, we call them the future, and for more than a decade, we have been committed to rebuilding Jewish life in that part of Europe where the destruction of the Holocaust was followed by the oppression of Communist rule.

Why are we helping in these countries? Because half a century after the Holocaust, Jews are still there and want to be Jewish once again. True enough, they may be few in number, but they are determined. They include:

Jews like Miriam, a Warsaw teenager who grew up knowing nothing about Judaism except that her grandparents died at Auschwitz, until she joined a Lauder Foundation youth club and felt as if she had come home;

Jews like Sabina, who took her children and grandchildren to a Lauder Foundation summer camp so they could get to know Jewish lore, Jewish traditions, and Jewish families just like their own;

Jews like Esther and Simon and David and Eva who attend the Lauder Javne Jewish Community Day School in Budapest and spend their school days with over 600 other Jewish children.

Providing Jewish education is our primary goal. For we know that if you bring Jewish life to children, they will bring it home to their parents, the lost generation that was deprived of its heritage.

That is why we send our students home each Friday with freshly baked challahs. With the blessings our teachers have taught them, they cross the vast gray cities of Warsaw and Minsk, the cobbled alleys of Prague and Vienna, the great boulevards of Budapest and Bucharest. In hundreds of homes that have not heard such prayers for generations, Judaism is returning over a loaf of bread, a pair of candles, a child's voice.

top

It comes down to this: either you agree that every Jewish child deserves a Jewish education, or you do not. If you do not agree, the Jews who remain in Central and Eastern Europe can be written off. Adolf Hitler was successful in destroying a thousand years of Jewish life in that region. The book is closed.

I believe that this book is still open. It will remain so as long as Jews in this part of Europe want to explore their Jewish identity.

Today, half a century after the Holocaust and nearly a decade after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Jews are free to be Jews and pick up the pieces of a history shattered by Nazism and stifled by Communism. Now that they are picking up those pieces, they need our help to put them together.

Through the Foundation that I established in 1987, I ardently support these efforts in country after country, city after city and home after home.

With its broad array of educational programs and community projects, the Foundation has accomplished much and because of the success of our efforts, more and more Jews throughout Central and Eastern Europe now seek a connection to their roots.

I firmly believe we are forging a chain that links the past we share to a future possible only if we all work together to help these Jews rightfully reclaim what was denied them for so long -- their Judaism.

RONALD S.LAUDER

top