Collegiate Times

Jewish students from around campus gathered for an 'Israeli Shibbat' at the Blacksburg Jewish Community Center hosted by Israeil Fellow Larissa Rozenblit and Hillel. Students said traditional Shabbat prayers and tucked into food similar to that available at a Shabbat dinner in Israel.

"People are not really noticing the fact that the mainstream in Judaism right now is a secular Judaism. It is mainstream and it is becoming quietly larger and larger and I think it's about time for the Jewish people to acknowledge that and forge a cultural and spiritual path given the fact that the majority of the Jewish people in the world are becoming less and less religious," Arav said.

While many agreed that Judaism was indeed trending toward a more secular approach to Judaism, Breslau points to a difference in the Israeli and American religious milieus that contains many of the differences.

Arav's statement is, "something that makes sense from an Israeli perspective because there is a secular-religious rift in Israel that really wouldn't occur to people in the U.S. Jews in the U.S. who don't practice don't feel like they're in some kind of competition with the religious. They don't feel like anyone is telling them that there is something not authentic about their Jewish identity. I think that's sort of reading a mostly internal Israeli discussion, maybe universalizing it when it's really confined, I think, to issues of Judaism in Israel," Breslau said. "Being Jewish in the U.S. is not insisting that you practice the religion in an Orthodox way. The stakes are so much higher in Israel. Because of the power of the organized faith in Israel, there aren't the kinds of options for practicing Judaism. In the U.S., it's pretty easy to tailor the faith to how flexible you want to be. In Israel, they don't have those options. It's very much all or nothing."

The first Reform synagogue to receive state funding on par with Orthodox synagogues opened in May of 2008. Israel has roughly two-dozen operating Reform congregations.

Yet for all of the debates about the position of Blacksburg's Jews vis--vis a Rabbinical presence or their place in world Judaism, the need to consider one's identity and address

one's own position is perhaps never clearer and never more important than when considered in a geographically and culturally remote clime, Sax said.

"I don't have a right to be ambivalent ... I think more about my identity here than I have in my entire life ... Now someone who has a Ph.D. in the history of Judaism now has a spot."

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