By Marcell Kenesei. Marcell is Director of Centropa Hungary programs, and is also currently running Centropa's network for European Jewish schools.  An ROI Micro Grant gave Marcell the opportunity to attend the Shifting Thought Shifting Action Program in Berlin in February 2013.

Participating in the Shifting Thought Shifting Action Program was a truly inspiring and remarkable experience. Since I believe that – especially in Europe – Jewish communities lack a strong network, a common platform where they can communicate with and learn from each other, a meeting like this empowers and encourages young leaders to keep on doing the good work. In Europe’s scattered Jewish communities we see an emerging willingness to reach out. We live in times where we do not understand borders anymore like our ancestors did. Our generation has to keep up with the new global challenges that we face. Most of us work for rebuilding a Jewish life, a world that has been almost completely destroyed, and our responsibility as Jews is to understand our role, to find ways how to meet these challenges, and nonetheless to give a new meaning to Judaism – one that does not know borders, one that understands differences between us but finds creative ways of productive cooperation. And this task is not possible without getting to know our fellows.
 
Shifting Thought Shifting Action gave us the opportunity to evaluate, compare, and attempt to improve what we do to rebuild Judaism. I feel we need to understand each other in order to overcome the global challenges that can be turned into opportunities once we realize what our common goals are and how we can invest our energies to achieve something much broader than our own little goals. "Think global and act local,” say many people these days and I certainly believe there is a lot of truth to this simple statement. And this conference just gave us the possibility to do so. Getting new ideas, getting inspired by other people’s success, adapting certain solutions, and even inventing new ways of solving long existing problems, or realizing problems that although existed but we were just too busy to see the forest from the tree.
 
This conference showed us what Jewish companionship can be in the 21st century. Not only did it provide us with new ideas, or new friends, but it also helped to build for ourselves a common global vision that I think is not shared by so many of us yet.  It helped us realize what our task is – or what our tasks could be – as the representatives of the new generation of Jews. It made me realize what great things could be achieved if more of us shared the willingness to think outside of our own boxes. I certainly hope that this was only one of the many steps to further our yet so weak links between us…