Youth prove dialogue key to Jewish unity

With a Jewish community of fewer than 10,000 people, Habonim Dror Aotearoa and Bnei Akiva New Zealand operate out of a single location. On paper, the two movements are ideologically opposed – one built on Labour-Zionist, secular-socialist foundations, the other on Religious-Zionist principles and Torah v’Avodah.

Yet madrichim and chanichim move between both movements, help run each other’s events, and grow up treating this as unremarkable. Neither movement has softened its politics. The community’s size is simply not large enough to sustain two self-sufficient worlds.

We didn’t grow up in that community. Australia has a Jewish population roughly 10 times the size of New Zealand’s, with a community large enough to allow our organisations to thrive independently, as silos, most of the time. We come from two of Australia’s Zionist youth movements – Hineni and Habonim Dror. These are organisations that sit in very different places on the religious and political spectrum. This year, at Bogsem, we found ourselves asking the same question New Zealand answers every year out of necessity: How can ideologically opposed youth movements build something meaningful together?

Bogsem (bogrim seminar) brought together 80 madrichim from across the religious and political spectrum of the Australasian Zionist youth movements, alongside other organisations actively engaging 18–23-year-olds. Religious and secular, left and right – movements that disagree with each other on almost everything, except that a Jewish future in Australia matters enough that we volunteer years of our lives to building it.

Shabbat was one of the seminar’s points of real tension, but also where it provided the clearest picture of what unity can look like. For the seminar to work, it was critical to create a shomer Shabbat environment in which halachic observances were upheld, while ensuring that those who do not keep Shabbat still felt that the space belonged to them. Rather than force one form of observance, we ran two prayer services in parallel.