Israeli authority try to convert Russian teens to Judaism, but it doesn't work.
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Russian-speaking teens feel estranged from Israel
By Yulie Khromchenko
High school pupils who immigrated to Israel between 2000 and 2002 feel estranged from the Jewish-Israeli identity and find it difficult to learn Hebrew.
This is one of the findings of a study conducted by Dr. Marina Niznick, to be presented today at an international conference on Russian-speaking Jews at the Ruth and Baruch Rappaport Center for the Study of Assimilation at Bar-Ilan University.
Niznick interviewed 144 high school pupils, aged 15 to 18, at various schools in Israel. The students immigrated from former Soviet states between 2000 and 2002, after the peak immigration era from those states.
Asked how they defined themselves, a large majority said they saw themselves as Russian, although most of them had emigrated from Ukraine and Belarus and not from Russia. Few defined their identity as Jewish and even fewer as Israeli.
"Until the age of 11, I didn't even know there was a Jewish nation or an Israeli state," one girl said. "How could I feel Jewish?"
"I go to a religious school and I'm fed up with hiding the fact that I'm Russian," another girl said. "They try to persuade us to convert [to Judaism], but I'm proud of being Russian. It is humiliating to me to turn myself into something I'm not."
These findings are essentially different from a similar study Niznick conducted among high school pupils who arrived in the 1990s. For the latter, the various identity definitions did not contradict each other and they defined themselves as Russian-Jewish-Israelis.
The questions indicated a significant difference in the approach to Jewish identity between the groups. The `90s immigrants saw their Judaism as an unchangeable part of their identity, like the color of their eyes or hair, regardless of whether they were practicing Jews. The immigrants of 2000, however, linked Judaism to observing religious decrees and since the overwhelming majority of them came from homes devoid of Jewish tradition, they felt estranged from it.
The immigrants of 2000 are in greater social isolation that those of the `90s and almost all said their social environment consisted exclusively of immigrants.
The study shows that immigrant pupils of recent years have considerable difficulty learning Hebrew. Most of them define their Hebrew language skills as lower than average and admit they don't always manage to read and write in Hebrew or understand lessons in Hebrew. Sixty percent of them complained of the deterioration in their school achievements because of language difficulties. The `90s immigrants reported good Hebrew skills.
Budgets for immigrant pupils are on a per person basis, so the first immigration wave enabled special Hebrew classes for them. The small number of immigrants in recent years does not enable schools to finance adequate help in learning Hebrew, and this significantly slows down the immigrants' academic progress.
Niznik also attributes the specific difficulties of the recent immigrants in learning Hebrew to the language change they already experienced in their countries of origin. Most pupils from Ukraine and Belarus had to move from the Russian they used in elementary school to Ukrainian or Belarussian. This, according to Niznick, damaged their ability to acquire a high level of skill and fluency in any other language, including Hebrew.
She also notes that while 90 percent of the immigrants in 1996 were Jewish and 95 percent in 1972 were Jewish, in 2000 only 45 percent were Jewish. A study in Russia indicates that only 27 percent of the immigrants of 2000 are Jewish.
haaretz.com |
