The Republican Forum of Jewish Youth has taken place in Almaty, gathering 49 young people from different cities of Kazakhstan (Almaty, Karaganda, Pavlodar, Petropavlovsk, Semipalatinsk, Taldykorgan, Taraz, Ust'-Kamenogorsk, Shymkent).

The event was opened by the President of the Mitzvah Association of Jewish Organizations of the Republic of Kazakhstan, EAJC Presidium member Alexander Baron. During his opening address, he stressed that the communities of these youths place great hope in them.

During the first day of the forum, a round table titled “My place in the community” took place. Its honorary participant was Doctor of Education, merited pegadogue of Kazakhstan, member of the Mizvah Association Council Grigoriy Umanov. In his address, he expressed hope that the youth of the communities will take up the banner of community building from those who had created and developed them.

As part of the Shoresh project for informal Jewish education, the participants of the forum were taught how to create projects. As Alexander Baron noted, “one's own dream and the need of the community need to be the base for every community project.”

An important part of the second day of the forum was a virtual meeting with the journalist Mikhail Nemirovsky, a representative of the Jewish community of New York. He spoke about the participation of Russian-speaking Jews in the community life in the Big Apple, about youth community projects, and the peculiarities of Jewish education in New York. Over an hour and a half long conversation, the participants of the forum asked approximately thirty questions to their American interlocutor, which concerned a wide range of aspects of community life. Ideas were expressed about joint Kazakhstan-American youth projects, and Nemirovsky promised to present them to community leaders in New York.

An important part of the forum was the preparation of community projects. Many participants had come already having a project to present, and yet for others this was a completely new kind of work, and the forum thus hosted special educational programs, in which over a course of two days participants developed a project and its business plan.

The culmination of the forum was the Project Market, which had 15 projects presented. The projects that made it to the finals were: “We want for there to be more of us,” an educational project by the participants from Ust'-Kamenogorsk; the uniting project of a participant from Almaty, “Connection Purim”; and the many-tiered project by participants from Pavlodar. “From Generation to Generation,” which includes several sub-projects (“And you may tell in the hearing of your grandson,” “Community Book,” “Genealogical Tree”; a project by a participant from Semey for a break-dance school; and a project by participants from Almaty, “Shabbat Shalom”). The finalist was the “From Generation to Generation” project, the developers of which will receive a grant to implement it.

As Alexander Baron noted while closing the forum, “As we can now see, our project – the Republican Forum of Jewish Youth – has been a great success. We have discovered new faces and met old friends, and you received the opportunity to learn about each other's work. We learned a lot from you, and we hope you learned from each other.”