Some 40,000 secular Israelis pray together on Yom Kippur

The first time Rabbi Yair Silverman held Yom Kippur services for secular Israelis in a school gymnasium in Zichron Ya’acov, only six families attended. This year, just two years later, some 1,500 participants turned up.

“Last year we had well over 1,000, and this year, many more,” says Rabbi Silverman, 35, an Orthodox rabbi from Montreal, who made aliyah three years ago.

“These are people who either have never gone to synagogue in the past or who last went as children,” Rabbi Silverman says. “Many discover for the first time, or rediscover, powerful feelings of forgiveness and renewal that can come along with experiencing Yom Kippur communally, and it is very moving for them.”

Rabbi Silverman is one of 200 rabbis who volunteered to hold explanatory Yom Kippur services across Israel for more than 40,000 secular participants this year, as part of an initiative called Praying Together.

The program, run by Tzohar: A Window Between Worlds, a non-profit organization dedicated to bridging the gap between secular and religious people in Israel, has grown by 10 to 15 per cent each year since it started in 10 years ago.

“The reality in Israel is that although some two-thirds of Israelis respect the sanctity of Yom Kippur and acknowledge it in one form or another, most stay at home,” says Tzohar co-founder and chair Rabbi David Stav.

Rabbi Stav believes the lack of comfort with Orthodox services can be attributed to several factors, including crowdedness of synagogues during the High Holidays, which makes non-regulars fearful of taking regulars’ seats; a non-welcoming atmosphere; alienation from the service itself, in which many non-observant find themselves lost in the prayer book; and hostility on the part of seculars toward the religious establishment, which they feel they would somehow be submitting to, by attending Orthodox synagogue services.

Tzohar services attempt to respond to these issues. They are held in cultural and community centres rather than synagogues, neutral places where attendees don’t feel like strangers or guests; rabbis stop frequently during services to offer explanations and reference page numbers; and Tzohar prints special kippot, a “machzor Yom Kippur,” and detailed handouts explaining the rituals, meanings of the prayers and prayer processes (when to stand, when to bow).

“For tens of thousands of Jews in Israel, Yom Kippur is their only contact with Judaism for the year,” says Nachman Rosenberg, executive vice-president of Tzohar. “It should be a warm, welcoming and meaningful spiritual experience.”

Rosenberg says that unlike many other non-profit organizations that aim to inspire secular Jews to become more observant, Tzohar is not a “stairway” to greater religious observance, and is concerned exclusively with offering secular Jews a connection to Jewish tradition at their level of comfort.

“We are not interested in encouraging secular Jews to become religious. We are interested in offering a spiritual window to the 80 per cent of secular Jews who will remain secular, but who want to have some connection to Judaism,” he says. “In Israel, being religious tends to be a zero sum game, and this is unfortunate, given that there are a lot of Jews looking for ways to embrace their tradition on their own terms.”

In some cases, however, the Yom Kippur services have led to the creation of new Judaism-centred communities. For instance, Rabbi Silverman’s High Holiday services have served as a springboard for the birth of a new community in Zichron Ya’acov, focused around weekly Shabbat services, which attract about 80 families, and Torah classes, which attract many more.

“We wanted to create a community that would be welcoming, respect people where they are at, and help them become the people they want to be, in a way that they find intuitively meaningful,” says Silverman.

“There is something tremendously ironic about the fact that secular Jews are alienated from ‘Jewish community’ in Israel, but they are. Jewish community is largely Orthodox and synagogue-centred here. At the same time, there is a real thirst among secular Jews for spirituality. There is an overarching trend in Israel to seek meaning in one’s life, which has blossomed over the last decade.”

At the heart of this “blossoming” is Tzohar, which was established in 1996 in response to increasing polarization between religious and secular populations in Israel – specifically when it came to marriage.

For most secular Israelis, their first brush with the national religious authority, the rabbinate, is when they get married, and many are turned off by the bureaucratic organization and its process. In lieu of the option to be married in a civil ceremony in Israel, many secular Israelis opt to wed in neighboring countries such as Cypress, since Israel recognizes civil marriages performed outside of the country.

Tzohar offered these couples a viable alternative, making available secular-friendly Orthodox services recognized by the rabbinate, free of charge. In addition, Tzohar’s volunteer rabbis adhere to a strict policy of booking only one wedding per day (as opposed to rabbis provided by the rabbinate, who are paid per ceremony and are more likely to overbook). Tzohar also offers pre-wedding ceremony consulting services.

Since the organization started to perform weddings 13 years ago, more than 30,000 couples have been married through Tzohar, with 2,500 to 3,000 requesting services each year.

“We managed to transform the Orthodox wedding in Israel into a phenomenal success,” Rosenberg says.

Today, the organization, with more than 1,000 rabbis, educators and volunteers, does much more to bridge the gap between secular and religious Israelis. In addition to performing marriages and running the Praying Together Yom Kippur program, Tzohar offers alternative rabbinate-mandatory premarital counselling to more than 2,500 brides each year, assistance with halachic Jewish authentication to thousands of families from the former Soviet Union, training and placement of Orthodox rabbis in 15 secular communities via the organization’s communities program (among them Rabbi Yair Silverman of Zichron Ya’acov), as well as public activism and Jewish educational leadership conferences and publications  that promote Jewish identity and unity in Israel.

“We believe there is a deep thirst for spiritualism and connection to Judaism among the people of Israel that is not being met by the religious establishment,” Rabbi Stav says. “It’s a pity that because of his attitude toward the religious establishment, the secular Jew will lose his ties to Judaism. That’s where we come in. We try to show secular Israeli society that Judaism and Jewish tradition are relevant to them.”

“There are many challenges facing Israel today,” Rosenberg adds. “This one – dwindling Jewish identity and the united Zionist spirit – is something that, unlike Iran, we can do something about. We have succeeded and can succeed in promoting the Jewish identity of the State of Israel.”