In 1924, Marc Chagall began painting The Falling Angel. That same year, across the globe in Omaha, Nebraska, fourteen Jewish boys formed Aleph Zadik Aleph, building the foundation for this incredible organization of which we are a part. It is a strange coincidence; on opposite sides of the world, two very different kinds of stories were beginning, one on canvas, one by teenagers. Now, more than a century later, both are still teaching us what it means to carry Jewish identity forward.

Mark Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk, which is now Belarus, and grew up in a Hasidic Jewish family. His childhood became one of the most important sources of his art. Even after leaving Vitebsk and eventually living in Paris, Chagall continued to paint the people, animals, religious objects and village scenes that lived in his memory, The Falling Angel being, perhaps the clearest example.

Chagall began the painting in 1924, but it did not remain the same painting. It was worked on and transformed across decades, ultimately dating 1924-1947. The world around Chagall changed dramatically during those years. Antisemitism intensified, the Nazis were in power, European Jews faced persecution and destruction and Chagall himself was eventually forced into exile. The painting changed with him. Everything is there. The beauty, fear, tradition, destruction, and the question of what comes next.

Now consider BBYO. When AZA began in 1924 and became an official organization, its founders could not have known what the organization would eventually become. They were simply creating space for young Jewish people, a community where Jewish teenagers could form friendships, build leadership, and experience Jewish life together. BBYO describes its history as a movement that has evolved with the changing world while preserving the rituals and traditions passed down through generations.

This is what makes the connection to Chagall interesting. Both The Falling Angel and BBYO are products of a Jewish world that no longer exist in exactly the same form. Chagall remembers the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe through paint. BBYO remembers Jewish life through people. Through rituals, songs, stories, chapter traditions, the friendships of teenagers who eventually graduate and leave their chapters behind, but continue to carry pieces of them forward. Chagall's canvas became a place where Jewish memory could survive. BBYO became a place where Jewish memory could continue to be lived.

There's also something important about the way Chagall combines different Jewish experiences within one painting. The Falling Angel  isn't a simple depiction of one moment Jewish history. It contains multiple layers of Jewish memory and European history at once. The Jewish figure, the Torah, the village, the religious imagery, and the chaos of the surrounding world all exist together. They overlap, they contradict one another, they tell different stories. However, they belong to the same picture. That feels remarkably similar to Jewish life in BBYO. There isn't one way to be Jewish. A BBYO member might connect to Judaism through Shabbat. Another might connect through social justice. Another through Israel, Hebrew, prayer, music, family, history, community, or simply the feeling of walking into a room and immediately knowing the people there understands something about them. Those experiences can look completely different but they can still exist within the same Jewish story. That is one of the most beautiful things about both Chagall’s painting and BBYO;  Jewish identity doesn't have to be one single image, it can be a collage.

The Falling Angel was begun in 1924, the same year as the first BBYO chapter to ever exist. BBYO is still here more than 100 years later. Chagall spent years returning the same canvas. BBYO has spent more than a century returning to the same fundamental question: How do we create meaningful Jewish life for the next generation? The answers have changed, the world has changed, the teenagers have changed, the technology has changed, and the Jewish community has changed. However, the act of passing something forward has remained. That may be the deepest connection between the painting and the movement.

There's a particular kind of power in realizing that Jewish life is not something one generation invented. Every generation inherited something from the one before it. Chagall inherited the sites and stories of Vitebsk. He carried them from Russia into France, and eventually into the paintings through which millions of people encounter them. Members inherit traditions from people they may never meet. A chapter ritual may have existed before your parents were born; a song might have been sung by hundreds of members before you. A chapter name, a piece of jewelry, a tradition, a convention, or a story about alumni can connect you to people who lived completely different lives. You've become part of a story that started before you arrived. Eventually you become one of the people responsible for continuing it. That is what Chagall did with his art and that is what makes BBYO ask its members what to do with Jewish community.

The most interesting part of The Falling Angel is that even though its title describes falling, the painting is ultimately about what survives. The Angel falls, the world changes, people disappear, however, the memory remains. Chagall kept returning to the painting because the story was not finished. In 1947, when the work was finally completed, it contained not only the world he had remembered as a child, but the painful history that he'd lived through as an adult. BBYO tells a story that keeps being rewritten. Those 14 boys in Omaha could not have imagined today's BBYO: thousands of Jewish teens connecting across more than 60 countries, building friendships, leading programs, celebrating Jewish life, and creating traditions of their own. But they started the story,  and every generation has since added another chapter. 

Both the painting and BBYO remind us that Jewish identity is not something that we simply inherit. It is something we carry with us.We carry it from Russia to Paris, From 1924 to 2026, from one chapter to the next, from one generation to the next. Chagall carried his Jewish world in his paintings, BBYO carries its Jewish world through its members. 

The following angel is still relevant to BBYO members today despite being more than a century old, because the question asks us is timeless; When the world changes, what will we choose to remember, and what will we choose to carry forward?