The Jewishness of Israelis: Responses to the Guttman Report

Foreword

Foreword From its founding in 1984, AVI CHAI committed itself to the perpetuation of the Jewish people, Judaism, and the centrality of the State of Israel to the Jewish people. We state our objective as follows: To encourage mutual understanding and sensitivity among Jews of different religious backgrounds and commitments to observance; and To encourage those of the Jewish faith towards greater commitment to Jewish observance and life-style by increasing their understanding, appreciation, and practice ofJewish traditions, customs and laws. Early in 1986, the board of AVI CHAI asked our chairman and executive director to meet with nearly fifty individuals whose knowledge of Israeli society spanned a wide range of professional disciplines and personal philosophies. We hoped that these interviews could help us understand the landscape in order to playa constructive role in attenuating the societal tensions connected to beliefs, observances, and social interaction among Israeli Jews. But this information, while providing useful background , did not prove to be a sufficient basis for sound philanthropic initiatives , in our opinion. Subsequently in that year, our board undertook to begin a "preliminary investigation to develop the design stage of a sociological, behavioral study of the people of Israel." We hoped that a comprehensive, sociological study that could define actual behavior and attitudes would present us with enough understanding of the complex societal dialectical tensions to develop our programmatic agenda. Despite this intent, the consideration of a study lay moribund while we tried a few other approaches between 1987 and 1990. First, we commissioned a literature search of published studies, both in Hebrew and xiii xiv Foreword English. Parallel to the literature review, we commissioned, under the direction of Charles Liebman, a series of case studies designed to offer anecdotal insights into the interrelationships between Israeli Jews of different levels of observance. The eleven studies were later published in 1990, by Keter Books, in both English and Hebrew. The title in English is Conflict and Accommodation betweenJews in Israel: Religious and Secular. In 1989, seeking further information and suggestions for action, we decided to solicit papers from a diverse group of outstanding Israelis. These papers, presented to the board in 1990, had a potpourri of interesting approaches but again did not provide us with sufficient "hard" data. People thought they knew what the Israeli public did and felt, but there was no reliable basis for their conclusions. In point of fact, we later discovered that the conventional wisdom was erroneous. Later in 1990, we finally undertook the commissioning of the study that forms the basis of this volume. We decided that the director of this project must be an Israeli social scientist with a reputation for professional integrity, widely respected in the academic community, with an institutional research framework in which to conduct the project. Professor Elihu Katz, scientific director of the Louis Guttman Institute of Applied Social Science in Israel, recipient of the Israel Prize for his work in the field of communication, was an obvious choice. That summer, frequent meetings were held by a steering committee composed of Professor Katz, Dr. Shlomit Levy (designated as the principal investigator), and Hanna Levinsohn (senior staff member), on behalf of Guttman, and on behalf of AVI CHAI, the Chairman Zalman C. Bernstein , Trustee David Weiss, and our professional staff. In December we entered into the grant letter that formalized the Steering Committee and dealt at some length, among other issues, with our mutual desire to ensure the confidentiality of the data and the conditions under which all, or part, of the data could be published, when, and by whom. AVI CHAI assured the Guttman Institute of complete independence in analysis and interpretation of the data. The Steering Committee held a series of meetings and finally agreed upon the sample size; that residents ofJudea and Samaria would be added and separately tabulated ; and all the interviews would be conducted face-to-face. It was also determined that Hebrew-speaking adults over twenty years of age would be the focus of the analysis, although we all understood that this would exclude much of the recent large immigration from the Soviet Union. Professor Katz pointed out that our desire to provide attitudinal information in order to understand where we might initiate programs for reducing societal tensions, combined with data on religious observance, made for two separate "forests." He suggested that we explore both Foreword xv forests at the same time by a common set...