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The Maccabim - Community Leadership in an Extended Jewish Context program, of the Jewish Agency's Partnership 2000 Beit Shemesh - Mateh Yehuda - Washington - South Africa, has completed its fourth year in our region, and a group of graduates has already formed. To mark the end of the year the Partnership organized a gathering of all the program graduates over the years, with a special and moving event.

Rabbi Benny Lowe started the proceedings by offering some valuable insight into the challenges of religion in a renewing society. He spoke about contemporary Israeli society, in all its aspects, going through a time tunnel from Abraham to Hassidic Judaism of the 19th century, and up to modern day national religious Zionism and its challenges in connecting with the whole of Israel, from the ultra orthodox to secularism. The lesson completed the circle of opinions to which the program students were exposed on a day trip which took place about two months ago.

The rest of the evening's agenda included a short film which summarized the program years of activity and the students' journeys abroad. There was also a short lesson about "the challenges of the journey" which connect`ed the students from all the different years of the program. For the evening's closing item the Partnership presented the graduates' program, The Source of Jewish Renewal, in which some of the graduates, who wish to continue with their studies and work in the field of Jewish renewal, are invited to take part.

Over the years in which the Partnership has run the program the students have talked about deep experiences of rediscovering Judaism, themselves, their families, their orders of priority, their community and Diaspora Jewry. It seems that the Jewish context generates a sense of wonderment and places the students' world in a Jewish context. There is a feeling that, in kist one year, the Partnership manages to breathe life into the words of poet Yehuda Amihai:

"And to hate and to forgive, and to remember and to forget
And to organize and to confuse, and to eat and to digest
What enduring history
Manages to do over a great many years."

(Yehuda Amihai, A Man in His Life, A Moment of Grace, 1983)