52 Israelis Among the Speakers at Limmud Conference in Britain, By Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz, December 22, 2006

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A prize-winning photographer who uses his camera to address homoeroticism and military life, a band from Sderot that injects pride into the Moroccan immigrant community, and a husband-wife rabbinic team that strives for social justice and equality: These are just a few of the faces of Israel that will be presented at this year’s Limmud conference in Britain.

Five years ago, about a dozen Israeli speakers – dealing mostly with politics – came to Britain for the annual conference, which brings together a wide variety of Jews for sessions ranging from Bible study to homeopathy. But this year, Limmud will be featuring 52 Israeli speakers, and politics will be only one of many issues on the agenda.

The Israelis constitute 15 percent of the presenters at the conference, which will take place from Sunday to Thursday at Nottingham University. Some 2,000 people, mostly from Britain, are expected to attend – including British-born Haaretz editor-in-chief David Landau, who will be speaking about the lessons of the past year in Israel and the extent to which criticism of Israel is legitimate.

“There’s been an increase in making Israel-related sessions a more significant part of the conference,” said Raymond Simonson, executive director of Limmud. “Israel is not just represented as ‘Israel at war’ or ‘Israel: The peace process.’ We’ve really expanded to include the whole multidimensional aspect of Israel.”

For photographer Adi Nes and singer Haim Uliel of the band Sfatayim, that multidimensionality involves integrating their personal histories as Mizrahi Jews who grew up in low-income towns with their presence in the mainstream Israeli cultural scene.

“Through my photographs, I will speak about the different layers that exist in the macrocosm of Israeli society and the microcosm of myself as an artist,” said Nes, whose work has been shown in Paris and New York, as well as throughout Israel. For instance, he has a series featuring youth in low-income areas much like his hometown of Kiryat Gat, and he has a series on soldiers that examines masculinity, an issue with which he grapples as a gay man.

Nes’ photograph of Israeli soldiers sitting around a table and eating, which is called Untitled 1999 but has come to be known as “The Last Supper,” sold at Sotheby’s last year for $102,000. The photograph, he said, depicts the fragility of existence and its role in Israeli society.

Uliel, a child of Moroccan immigrants who grew up in Sderot, combines Moroccan-style music with rock and uses the Moroccan dialect in some of his lyrics. He will be performing for Limmud participants as well as speaking to them about his background and how it relates to his music.

The role of Israeli women in society will also be on the agenda at the conference. The topic will be addressed by Rabbi Einat Ramon, the dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem, who is the first Israeli-born woman to become a rabbi and the first woman to head a Conservative rabbinical school. Ramon is one half of the rabbinic couple that will be speaking at the conference: She is married to Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli organization that works against violations of human rights on both sides of the Green Line.

Diplomat Akiva Tor is eager to hear what Limmud participants have to say about how to decrease assimilation and increase the number of young people who receive a Jewish education. Reducing assimilation in the Diaspora is the main concern of the World Jewish Forum, which Tor organized while serving as adviser on the Jewish world to President Moshe Katsav. Tor is now director of the Foreign Ministry’s Jewish communities department.

“British Jewry is suffering from a very severe decline in numbers over the last several decades,” said Tor, who immigrated from Cleveland in 1985. “I want to talk to the audience and hear what they have to say.”

Tor will also be discussing the role of Jewish foreign policy values in the modern nation-state of Israel. The country’s efforts to find Israeli travelers who go missing abroad is an example of Israel acting less in its own national interest than in the interest of the Jewish people as a community, he said.

This sense of a cross-border Jewish community is fostered by the Limmud conference and its open dialogue between British and Israeli Jewry. For Tor, it is also something else: “I think it’s one of the reasons why Israelis love their country,” he said.

52 Israelis Among the Speakers at Limmud Conference in Britain, By Shoshana Kordova, Haaretz, December 22, 2006

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