When a speaker recently heralded them as "the future of the Jewish people," the assembled members of the French Union of Jewish Students (Union des Etudiants Juifs de France - UEJF) stood up and left the room. Vanessa Bressler, a student at Sciences Politiques in Paris and the chair of UEJF explained, "They have to know that we're not the future‹we're the present and they have to deal with us now. If they won't deal with us now, we're not going to listen to them."
The UEJF's insistence on being heard now has secured the group a prominent position in the French Jewish community. Bressler serves as one of ten members of the community's central policy-setting board. As a regular voting delegate to this committee, she ensures that student issues remain at the forefront of the community's agenda.
Bressler's confidence in the power of students characterizes the attitude of the 250 participants in the 23rd Congress of the World Union of Jewish Students, held in Jerusalem this January.
While students in the United States are primarily serviced by professional organizations such as Hillel, The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, students in most other countries run their own unions. These unions generally have small, campus-based branches and a student-run national structure. Students fundraise, set policy, balance budgets, hold conferences, coordinate large-scale Israel trips, and implement political projects without the assistance of an adult-run infrastructure.
In some countries, the student movement is so well established that the adult community rarely questions student autonomy. Amanda Braude, the chair of the South African Union of Jewish Students and a student at Wits University in Johannesburg, praises her community for its continuous financial and emotional support, "If anything, they push us to do even more than we're doing."
Elsewhere, students have earned community respect more slowly. In most Latin American countries, student unions are included in the community boards, according to Salomon Chertorivski, the chair of the Latin American Union (Federacion Universitaria Sionista Latinoamericana - FUSLA). In addition, FUSLA sits on the Executive of the Latin Jewish Congress. However, this level of inclusion has not always been the norm, says Chertorivksi. "They really respect us and try to help us out whenever they can; the thing is that this relationship is the result of many years of fighting until they realized that we will do things with or without them so they'd rather be a part of it."
Student leaders stress the empowerment that comes through running their own organizations. Roger Schueler, the chair of AUJS speaks of the responsibility of maintaining the budget of his organization, "I'm twenty-two years old and the other day I signed a check for $250,000. How often does that happen?" In most communities students receive some communal funding, but still must devote much of their energy to soliciting individual donations.
Thomas Atthias, a member of UEJF and a student at the Sorbonne, blames the apathy of American students for the absence of a union structure in the United States. "In France, students are active," he said. "We're political, we protest, we fight for what we believe. We're not like American students who are passive. They let adults give them everything and they believe that we just have to all be happy being Jewish and that's enough. We're stronger than that."
Jill Jacobs is a senior at Columbia University in New York City