"For a strong Jewish identity, sometimes you have to step out of Israel," says Makki Osheroff-Gerzon, who found Judaism at a Reform summer camp in the U.S. 16 years ago. "To be a Jew in Israel is, for the most part, to be Orthodox," she says. Her experience with Judaism in America "touched the deepest side of [her] identity."

Osheroff-Gerzon, the director of the Reform Movement education department in Israel, spoke to two bus-loads of GA delegates early yesterday morning, and said that though the Reform Movement has passed "the tough years" in introducing itself to Israeli society, it is still engaged in a struggle that is, for the most part, foreign to American Jews.

The delegates, who traveled to Jerusalem´s Hebrew Union College as part of the GA´s day of "classrooms on wheels," all opted to explore the religious streams of Judaism in Israel, one of 55 different bus-tour options for yesterday´s program.

The GA delegates, who represented a variety of religious observance and affiliations within their own communities in North America, also joined the kindergarten students from the movement´s day school for their daily morning prayers, and spoke to a Reform rabbinical student who immigrated to Israel from Ukraine 13 years ago.

Paula Edelstein, the chair of Israel´s Movement for Progressive Judaism, says that bringing an "American understanding of Judaism" is vital to the development of Reform Jewry in Israel. "There is more than one way to be Jewish ... and we are giving so-called secular people ways to express their Judaism," says the American-born Edelstein. "Families [in Israel] must reintroduce Judaism into their lives."

Edelstein, who said that the Reform Movement is not, contrary to popular belief, "an import from North America," thanked Jewish Federations for their support in "enabling [Reform Judaism in Israel] to grow and develop." She also pointed to the movement´s "indigenous" roots, adding that German immigrants to Israel founded the first Reform temple in the 1930s in Haifa.

Anat Hoffman, an activist in the Israel Religious Action Center, "the social arm of the Reform Movement," also addressed the GA delegates, and said that she too found Progressive Judaism for the first time in the United States. As a student athlete at the University of California - Los Angeles, Israeli-born Hoffman says that she realized for the first time that "there is more than one understanding of Judaism."

Hoffman, who is now active in the movement´s struggle toward the recognition of Reform conversions and wedding ceremonies, says that when she tells people in Israel that she is a religious Reform woman, they think it is an oxymoron. "In Israel, the word dati [religious] means Orthodox." Still, she says that secular religious Israelis are looking for a place to "express other way of being Jewish."

Philip Schlussel, a GA delegate from New York who is active in his local Reform temple, says that he was disturbed to learn about the problems facing Reform Jewry in Israel. "Some people here are, unfortunately, still intolerant," he says, adding that his own congregation doesn´t face the same problems as those that Edelstein and Hoffman described.

Rachel Silverman, 21, a student delegate in the GA who is president of Hillel at Brandeis University, says she chose to participate in this specific classroom on wheels because she is considering a career in rabbinics. "I love pluralism and I want to work with it," she says. (© Copyright 2003 Haaretz. 11/19/03)