The Restoration of the Jewish People

Starting about two generations ago as a curiosity, and a relatively minor one at that, a scattered but global phenomenon is gradually becoming a major force that is redefining Jewish reality. Millions of individuals who in the past would have been regarded as irretrievably lost to the Jewish people are now visibly in contact with it, and some of them or their descendants are actively returning to the fold. At the same time, many more persons or groups with at best very distant Jewish connections are strengthening those connections and moving closer to the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

Even if only a small part of those with such affinities pursue some form of identification with the Jews, the demographic and cultural result will be momentous, an influx possibly on the scale of tens of millions of people wishing to forge strong ties with the Jewish people and, in a significant number of cases, to join it outright.

In both scope and intensity, this is a situation unprecedented in Jewish history, and certainly at any time since the destruction of the Temple some 2,000 years ago. Yet because it is still diffuse, and by nature disorganized, it is also largely misunderstood.