Flying from Pittsburgh to New York one night in July, I became caught up in a conversation with the young woman sitting next to me. It was a conversation that continues to disturb me.

The woman was dressed in the way today’s secular women dress in summer, and I could not discern whether she was Jewish. She soon confirmed that she was. Having noticed me studying from a Hebrew book, she commented that while she could identify the letters of the alphabet, she could not read the words without the vowel sounds.

This in itself did not strike me as a big deal; there are many committed Jews who have difficulty mastering vowel-less Hebrew.

As we conversed, she told me that she had celebrated her bas mitzvah, and had subsequently studied in Sunday school until the age of eighteen. My first thought was that here was a Jewess who, while not well-versed in Judaism, certainly had been taught the rudiments.

But I was in for a shocker, when I determined that she did not know anything about kosher food. I am not referring to some of the finer details that govern kashrus; I mean that she did not know that ham and bacon are treif!

There was more. She was astonished to discover that shellfish are not kosher. “Do you mean that you’ve never eaten lobster?” she asked me. If she had grown up in some small town — in disconnection from other Jews — I would have been less dismayed. But this woman lives in Manhattan, in a neighborhood laden with Jews, synagogues, and available Jewish activities. Ensconced in the heart of Jewish America, she is Jewish in name only.

How can this be? How can we have failed so miserably to teach the basics? What was she studying in Sunday school all those years? No, it was not an Orthodox school, but do we ask too much if we expect every Jew to know that meat and milk don’t mix (another fact she did not know)?

It used to be that Jews who turned away from religion at least knew what they were rejecting. This young woman has never rejected Yiddishkeit — bas mitzvah and Sunday school and Passover sedarim (which she celebrates) notwithstanding, she has never been given the substance.

And she is not alone. On Long Island, the intermarriage rate exceeds seventy percent, and eighty percent of Jews there do not attend a synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In some communities, intermarriage has so complicated identity that one often does not know who is Jewish and who is not. In day schools across the U.S., boys and girls who are not halachically Jewish are intermingled among the student population. The consequences of this can be disastrous for the Jewish people.

Our outreach organizations and movements do wonderful work, and when a Jew is brought closer to Torah, the reverberations can impact many generations to come. But we are, in a sense, throwing buckets of water up Niagara Falls, and we need to recognize it.

Truth be told, the same tragic situation is developing in Israel. In the midst of the phenomenal growth of Torah learning the Jewish State has enjoyed, hundreds of thousands are not being taught their religious heritage. The gap between committed Jews and Jews who prefer to think of themselves as “Israelis” continues to widen.

Newly elected Prime Minister Ehud Barak has a mountain of challenges that he must conquer. Peace, economics, the housing of immigrants. But little of this will matter if he does not squarely acknowledge the religious education gap that threatens Israel’s spiritual fiber. And with the avowed secularist Yossi Sarid in charge of the Education Ministry, the outlook for the next four years is not rosy.

As for my new acquaintance, she said that she had been considering taking a class in Judaism. I told her that I would research and recommend classes in her neighborhood. I also suggested the book To Be a Jew, by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin, long considered the best English-language primer on our faith.

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the chazzan sings a prayer that always brings tears to my eyes. That prayer, V’ye’esayu, said in most synagogues, describes how, in Messianic times, all the nations of the world will worship the one true G-d. How tragic it is that we must pray for the same for our Jewish brothers and sisters who, through no fault of their own, are estranged from their roots. This High Holiday season, we will as always beseech G-d for the betterment of the entire world. But certainly we first must worry about our own brethren, educating them to see the Torah’s beauty, to the point when, in the words that conclude V’ye’esayu, “they will give You the crown of royalty.”

Avraham M. Goldstein