Limmud

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Limmud Festival

Ending 2021 as one Festival community

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Around 2000 participants from more than 40 countries worldwide came together for Limmud Festival 2021 

Limmud is thrilled to have been able to bring people together again as a community of learning, despite the ongoing pandemic, for a programme of over 300 diverse, inspiring and thought-provoking sessions.  

The core team of 16 dedicated volunteers led the way in creating Festival 2021 alongside the efforts of 1 in 4 participants who contributed their time, to provide the Limmud community with another fantastic event for participants of all ages. 

The five-day event (including programming before and after Shabbat) saw sessions from 367 presenters on subjects from the topical – such as current political issues and impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on the community, to the niche – such as shmita laws for Jews in the Diaspora and the Jolles Encyclopaedia of British Jewish cantors, chazanim, ministers and synagogue musicians. 

The event welcomed political speakers David Lammy MP, Councillor Carla Denyner, and former MK Aliza Lavie, alongside performers including Chava Mirel, Joanie Leeds and The Macaroons. In addition, the programme featured 27 sessions from European Limmud volunteers spotlighting 15 different communities. 

For press coverage see below:

What to expect at this year’s Limmud Festival – The Jewish Chronicle

David Lammy apologises for nominating Jeremy Corbyn as leader – The Jewish News

David Lammy: I regret nominating Corbyn for leadership – The Jewish Chronicle

Labour’s David Lammy apologises for nominating Jeremy Corbyn to be leader – The Guardian

David Lammy says he made a mistake nominating Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader – The Telegraph

A telling admission from David Lammy – The Telegraph

David Lammy apologises for nominating Jeremy Corbyn to be Labour leader – The Independent

David Lammy says sorry for nominating Jeremy Corbynas Labour leader – The Times

Communities should embrace the ‘Ashkenazi Marranos’ – The Jewish Chronicle

Importance of educating against ‘rape culture’ the focus at Limmud session – The Jewish News

Limmud moves children’s sessions online in wake of omicron wave – The Jewish Chronicle

What to expect at this year’s Limmud Festival

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The fully online lineup features David Lammy, a cocktail tutorial and pre-Shabbat challah-making

Simon Rocker, Jewish Chronicle, 23 December 2021

Despite being entirely online for a second year in a row, this year’s Limmud Festival holds many of the typical treats: cocktail-making, lots of opportunities for networking and a big-hitting figure from the Labour Party. 

But while there will be plenty of current affairs sessions at the five-day gathering, which begins on Friday with pre-Shabbat challah-making, there is little on the programme about antisemitism in the Labour Party and on the left. 

“It seemed to be a less popular choice this year,” said one of the leaders of the programme team, Harry Lampert, who first came to Limmud as a child of five or six and will be contributing a cocktail-making session, including Tequila Shacharit, this time. 

This year’s major political guest is Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who follows in the footsteps of other Labour names who have addressed the annual event including leader Sir Keir Starmer and Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry. 

At the time of writing, an in-person children’s and family programme had been scheduled in a London venue. But whereas organisers had originally planned a hybrid event for the main festival, a couple of months later they presciently decided it would be safer to remain wholly online for a second year. 

“I know someone from my synagogue whose first Limmud experience was last year,” Mr Lampert said. “She was a bit unsure what it would be like, being an online event. She ended up going to a session at every single available slot. She has signed up again this year. It’s nice to know that even moving online we haven’t lost our touch.” 

Although it is impossible to replicate the socialising of a physical festival, Limmud hopes the use of a new online platform, Hopin, will aid interaction between participants. 

“A huge amount of work has gone into building something that is more immersive than Zoom,” said Limmud deputy director Jon Freedman, “because we really want to make it easy for participants to speak to one another when they are not in a session — to discuss the session they have just been to… or to network and generate ideas about projects they want to work on.” 

A networking facility will allow Limmud-goers to strike up a three-minute conversation with another participant at random between sessions, just as if they had started chatting while in a coffee queue. 

The online format has helped in recruiting presenters from abroad. “I am very keen for this year’s festival to feel international,” said festival chairman Ben Combe. “We always aim for that but obviously there are logistical challenges – flying people in. It is so much logistically easier than it would be when you are all in-person.” 

The veteran New York Orthodox politician Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, will be one of the speakers from overseas, as will Joel Carmel, a Londoner who made aliyah and now belongs to the radical soldiers’ group opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Breaking the Silence. 

Three hours of Monday’s progamme will have a special focus on Europe with sessions ranging from Yiddish in Sweden, where it is recognised as one of five official minority languages, to opening a new Jewish school in Bulgaria during the pandemic. 

“One aim is to use the ease of online to take people around the continent and dip in and out of Jewish life and culture outside of their own bubble,” Mr Freedman said. 

Over the years, Limmud has been a significant platform for extending the range of women’s voices and this year is no exception. Tamar Kamionkowski, who teaches at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, offers a feminist reading of Leviticus, while Dana Pulver has set the rabbis to music in “talmudic ballads”. 

The programme offers “as much variety on different topics as you’d expect to see,” Mr Freedman said. The 300 or so presenters range from the veteran campaigner for refugee children, Lord Dubs, to master milliner David Shilling, whose session is entitled “The Mad Hatter”. 

Amid the history, Bible and philosophy classes, there will be comedy and music, from Jerusalem’s Niggun Ensemble pre-Shabbat to Grammy award-winner Joanie Leeds, who will give a concluding performance on Tuesday night.  

Limmud moves children’s sessions online in wake of omicron wave

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The whole festival will now be digital

Simon Rocker, Jewish Chronicle, 20 December 2021

Limmud has cancelled the in-person sessions for children and families that had been scheduled as part of this year’s Festival owing to the surge in the omicron variant of coronavirus.

A spokesman for the festival, which begins on Friday, said they had taken the “difficult decision” to move wholly to an online format.It was, he said, “made in consultation with medical doctors, public health professionals and senior youth workers, who all ultimately concurred that – with case numbers set to increase further this week – it is essential to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of children, parents and ​volunteers.”

But he added, a series of interactive online sessions would be “available to families at zero cost, and children can dip in and out as they wish.

“Those who have already booked for our youth and families programmes will also receive a little surprise in the post this week, because even though they can’t come to Limmud Festival, we promise to bring a little piece of festival to each family.”

Limmud: When British Jews enjoy a few days of Utopia

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The annual festival is a chance to explore what an ideal community might look like

Rabba Dr Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz, Jewish Chronicle, 13 December 2021

Once again Limmud Festival is on the horizon, though still sadly diminished by the limits imposed by the pandemic. Like last year, Festival 2021 will be an online event (although in-person families and youth programmes are planned). Even the presence of a star-studded list of international presenters and local talent will not be enough to prevent most old-timers who have attended pre-pandemic Limmuds from mourning the loss of something elusive.

At first this might be a little counter-intuitive — after all, Limmud is meant to be a “marketplace of ideas”, a unique opportunity to hear fabulous teachers and educators on all sorts of subjects, from Talmud to tikkun olam, and from Israel to identity politics. Surely that is perfectly easy to reproduce online? There were 370 sessions over three days last year, given by presenters from the UK and all over the world, and around 5,000 people were estimated to have attended. Isn’t that a completely successful Limmud?

Not really, as most of those who were there would be the first to admit. I’m currently researching the history and development of Limmud at the Centre for Jewish Studies at Manchester University, and while interviewing founders, volunteers, presenters and participants from all four decades of Limmud, I’ve discovered that for most of them, the crucial part of Limmud is its creation of an ideal, perhaps utopian, community where Jewish life can be lived more intensely; where community divisions and feuds can be ignored or even challenged for a few precious days; and where Jewish identity and hopes can be recharged in order to cope with the cold world outside. 

“Going to Limmud is like going to Narnia”, said a former chair, and that perfectly captures this magical and, above all, personal encounter with others that lies at the heart of a good Limmud. It’s not just, or even principally, the sessions; the essence of Limmud lies in the open encounters with other people, the chance chats over a cup of coffee, the intense conversation with a presenter, the friends made in the dinner queue. 

As one interviewee noted, “I feel very close to my Limmud friends, even though I may not see them out of Limmud. It’s a relationship with people through a shared experience.”

Back in 1998, the sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris described Limmud as “a fictional, delusionary space”, which he viewed as an escapist attempt by British Jewry to “wish away difficult … and intractable problems”. While some of his analysis still rings true, I would argue that Limmud actually supplies an essential space in which to reimagine what an ideal Jewish community might look like and to explore new ways of “doing” community. 

Set in a British Jewish landscape that is still deeply divided along denominational lines, many attendees use Limmud to explore other, “forbidden” parts of the community that differ from their own — with the notable exception of the Charedi sector and right-wing mainstream Orthodoxy, who fear precisely this mutual exploration. 

Participants have told me about “trying out” other denominations’ services, or of the impact on them made by their first experience of meeting and learning from people who do not belong to their own corner of the community. One Reform rabbi, recalling his first Limmud in the late 1980s, noted that “this intermingling of the community really didn’t occur anywhere else”.

Another, Orthodox, participant told me wistfully, “I wish my community was like Limmud”. Yet another attendee recalled that Limmud had taught her that “it was fine to live in many different worlds”. For some, there was a real sense of building a new model of Jewish community: “It was working on the ground, people were building relationships, people were learning from each other, people were not just tolerating but respecting each other in a really fundamental way.”

For others, the transformative experience at Limmud was not just discovering other denominations’ ways of being Jewish, but the possibility of a new level of Jewish experience: “I felt like I was joining a spiritual community”, said one Reform woman.

Another woman told me, “Whereas we in the Orthodox community had to be coaxed to enjoy our Judaism, here I saw for the first time people for whom Judaism didn’t get in their way, but gave them something much richer. They wanted to do good in the world through it, which was not a concept that had ever entered my mind.”

Many interviewees described Limmud as a safe, creative space which offered them rare opportunities: “I’m able to express my own religious identity in a safe environment where I know no-one’s going to judge me,” said one woman. Another remarked, “Limmud has made me braver”.

Like any experimental laboratory, Limmud has had its fair share of failures and faults, of shortcomings and disappointments. But its existence for so many people as a shared space of vision accounts for its continuing influence, and has a profound link to the Jewish concept of the messianic age — something for which people yearn, and work to bring to reality. 

Years ago, Rabbi Michael Harris, of Hampstead United Synagogue, revealed in a Limmud video that his daughter Nechama, then very young, thought Limmud carried on all year round and that her family just popped in to visit for a few days. He added she was right, in a way, and so she was: for many thousands of people, Limmud is not just for Christmas, but provides a community of vision, a space for creativity, and perhaps even a taste of the “days of the Messiah”. 

(Photo credit: Jerrold Bennett)

Limmud – where next?

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The cross-communal must continue to innovate if it is to remain true to its spirit

Ben Crowne, Jewish Chronicle, 1 January 2021

Limmud Festival 2020 was by far our largest event ever, transformed into an online experience by a volunteer team who never met in person.

In a year which paralysed so much, Limmud ran more UK events than ever before, alongside dozens of teams around the world. At the height of the first lockdown, in the worried weeks around the chagim, and now in tier 4, we were able to bring people together to learn, entertain, collaborate and share connections despite our isolation. Our experience was not unique and is a testament to the resilience and goodwill we have seen displayed throughout the pandemic.

But as we cautiously plan for 2021, the temptation to revert back to established patterns can be overwhelming. Our anniversary activities – panels, an archive project and on-going academic research – have emphasised how little some things have changed in decades.

Limmud Festival 2019 was perhaps a little better catered, had more efficient logistics and hewed slightly closer to the communal mainstream than Limmud Conference 2000, but its essential features were the same – and most of them transitioned into our online event this year.

The same is probably true for much of our Jewish lives and for many institutions – yet in the same time our professional and domestic lives have been transformed by new technologies, structures and social trends. The recovery from Covid-19 offers the opportunity to ask ourselves: what truly needs to go back to the way it was? Where are we confusing familiarity with quality? These are questions we are asking ourselves as we start thinking about Festival 2021 but they are concerns which the whole community should consider.

For Limmud, one fresh perspective comes from the remarkable ways that a distinctively British event has evolved to the needs of other communities. There are nations where Limmud is a central fixture in Jewish life, with events drawing ten or 20 per cent of the Jewish population.

A UK event of similar proportions might look something like Rosh Hashana Urbano, a vast street festival run by Limmud Buenos Aires. What would a 25,000-person gathering in Golders Green, or on Hampstead Heath, look like? And aren’t we the poorer that it seems unrealistic to even ask?

Another approach would be to consider the generations of Limmud volunteers who have helped transform the wider Jewish landscape. An impact study in 2018 found that involvement in Limmud led almost 20 per cent of UK volunteers to set up a new Jewish initiative or organisation.

Although inspiring, many of these projects should challenge us – what is it about our community that pushes people to found something from scratch, rather than work with established organisations? What would it look like if more organisations gave volunteers the autonomy and resources that Limmud gives its Festival teams?

And how could Limmud transform our own events and ideas, if some of that energy for change was redirected inside our own structures?

Even as a virtual event, Limmud succeeds when it gathers a cross-section of our community into a single setting, and acknowledges all that we share. As an online event, we have seen hundreds of first-time participants – Charedim dialing into Zoom from landlines, students who would never go to Jsoc, Jews from towns with no synagogue or communal life.

Their presence this year is uplifting, but also a reminder that there remains much work to be done for us to be truly accessible and inclusive. What barriers have we temporarily lowered, and how can we ensure that they are not re-erected in a return to the status quo?

For years we have aspired to have “a Limmud in every country where there are Jews” – and we are most of the way there. But we have only been able to accomplish that via local teams of volunteers who saw a set of ideas that they liked, and wanted to use that to create something new and impactful in their own communities.

After 40 years of expansion and growth, that impulse to see change remains at the heart of Limmud’s success and needs to be embraced as we look to the next 40.

Ben Crowne is a trustee of Limmud

First online-only Limmud festival sets participation record

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Organisers estimate that this year’s event attracted 5,000 from around the world

Simon Rocker, The JC, 30th December 2020

This year’s digital version of the Limmud Festival attracted record participation as the cross-communal event celebrated its 40th anniversary.

More than 3,800 people bought tickets but organisers calculate that once multiple viewers on screened sessions were factored in, the number of participants reached 5,000.

The combination of Torah study, lectures on literature, history and Jewish thought, comedy, music and political debate drew audiences from 46 countries including Iceland, Madagascar and the United Arab Emirates.

While Dame Maureen Lipman charmed younger viewers with her reading of an old Yiddish folktale, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis revealed during a talk on resilience in times of adversity his favourite Leonard Cohen song, Anthem.

The Chief Rabbi said his favourite lines from the song were: “Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.”

“Just marvellous words,” Rabbi Mirvis said. “Let’s make music with what is left. Let’s remember those desperate times behind us but at the same time count our blessings and make our blessings count.”

Rob Simmons, the festival’s chair, said it had “united 5,000 Jews from around the world in a virtual community.

“Despite the distance and the difficulties, we are proud to have delivered 350 sessions, a welfare hub, chat rooms, participatory programming, and countless other innovations.

“Our steering team of 20 volunteers have dedicated 10 months to bringing this event together and I know the entire Limmud community is grateful for the spectacular results they have achieved.”

Although Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid was a late withdrawal owing to the country’s latest political meltdown, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was able to speak to an estimated 2,500 people.

An average of eight Zoom sessions an hour ran over three days from nine in the morning till nine at night from Sunday to Tuesday, as well as a pre- and post-Shabbat programme, with participants able to exchange views using the Slack messenger platform.

Some of the 80 who took part in the first educational retreat at Carmel College, Oxfordshire in 1980 reconvened to reminisce, including Michael May, the former director of London’s Institute of Jewish Affairs, who gave the event its name.

Sian Beenstock, 39, of Hendon, North-West London, confessed to being “in tears” when she learned that the physical event would not be taking place this year.

She and her husband, Gerrard, 45, met at Limmud in Nottingham 2001 and have been dedicated attenders since.

Mrs Beenstock enjoyed “great sessions but I miss the in-person bit, I was in the virtual bar and you could chat to people in some of the sessions but it’s not the same.” Overall, she said, “they have done a great job in this situation”.