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Conservative Judaism
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Conservative Judaism is a modern stream of Judaism, which views Religious
Law (Halakha) as binding, yet also regards it as subject to historical
development. The movement regards its approach to Jewish Law as the
authentic and traditional one, disavowing both what it considers the excesses of
Reform Judaism and the stringency of Orthodoxy. Reconstructionist Judaism is
an offshoot of Conservative Judaism.
Conservative Judaism views itself as a continuation of the Positive-Historical
School led by Rabbi Zacharias Frankel in mid-19th Century Germany. While at
first close to the pioneers of Reform Judaism, he broke with the movement
which he perceived as too radical. In America, the term 'Conservative' came to
denote the group centered around the JTS, which coalesced in opposition to the
publication of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform. While a common label from then
onward, symbolizing relative traditionalism, JTS-affiliated communities and
rabbinic organizations became a wholly independent denomination only in the
postwar years, after a long process of separation from the moderate,
Americanized wing of Orthodox Judaism.
In many countries outside the United States and Canada, including Israel,
Germany and the UK, it is today known as Masorti Movement (Hebrew for
"Traditional").
In the United States and Canada, the term Conservative, as applied, does not
always indicate that a congregation is affiliated with the United Synagogue of
Conservative Judaism, the movement's central institution and the one to which
the term, without qualifier, usually refers. Rather, it is sometimes employed by
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unaffiliated Ashkenazi groups to indicate a range of beliefs and practices more
liberal than is affirmed by the Orthodox or Modern Orthodox, and more
traditional than the more liberal Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism. In
Canada, several congregations belong to the Canadian Council of Conservative
Synagogues instead of the United Synagogue. The moniker Conservadox is
sometimes employed to refer to the right wing of the Conservative spectrum,
although "Traditional" is used as well (as in the Union for Traditional Judaism).
Both Conservative/Masorti and Reform/Liberal rabbinical assemblies are
installing women in highest leadership assignments and ordain female, as well
as male, rabbis.
Organizational structure
The Conservative-Masorti movement is unified on a global level by Masorti
Olami, representing affiliated congregations in the Americas, Europe, Africa,
Asia, and Australia (Kehilat Nitzan). Masorti Olami unites a number of smaller
national and regional organizations, including:
 The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ) in the United
States and Canada,
 The Assembly of Masorti Synagogues in the United Kingdom,
 Masorti Europe in Europe,
 Masorti AmLat in Latin America,
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The international association of Conservative/Masorti Rabbis is known as the
Rabbinical Assembly; the Cantors Assembly is the organization of chazanim.
The global youth movement is known as NOAM (an acronym for No'ar
Masorti); its North American chapter is called the United Synagogue Youth.
The movement maintains numerous Rabbinical seminaries and other
educational institutions.
In addition, while Hungarian Neolog Judaism is not officially affiliated with
Masorti, Conservative Judaism regards it as a fraternal, "non-Orthodox but
halakhic" movement.
History
Like Reform Judaism, the Conservative movement developed in Europe and the
United States in the 19th century, as Jews reacted to the changes brought about
by the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, a confluence of events that lead
to Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment. In Europe the movement was known
as Positive-Historical Judaism, and it is still known as "the historical school."
Historical antecedents
Positive-Historical Judaism, the intellectual forerunner to Conservative
Judaism, was developed as a school of thought in the 1840s and 1850s in
Germany. Its principal founder was Rabbi Zecharias Frankel, who had broken
with the German Reform Judaism in 1845 over its rejection of the primacy of
the Hebrew language in Jewish prayer and the rejection of the laws of kashrut.
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In 1854, Frankel became the head of the Jewish Theological Seminary of
Breslau then in Kingdom of Prussia (now in Poland as Wrocław). At the
seminary, Frankel taught that Jewish law was not static, but rather has always
developed in response to changing conditions. He called his approach towards
Judaism "Positive-Historical," which meant that one should have a positive
attitude towards accepting Jewish law and tradition as normative, yet one should
be open to developing the law in the same fashion that it has always historically
developed. On the one hand, Frankel rejected the innovations of Reform
Judaism as insufficiently based in Jewish history and communal practice. On
the other hand, by using of modern methods of historical scholarship to develop
rabbinic law, Frankel differed with neo-Orthodox Judaism, which was
concurrently emerging under Samson Raphael Hirsch.
United States
The differences between the more modern and traditional branches of American
Judaism came to a head in 1883, at the "Trefa Banquet" at the Highland House
entertainment pavilion, which was at the top of the Mount Adams Incline –
where shellfish and other non-kosher dishes were served at the celebration of
the first graduating class of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. The adoption
of the radical Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, which dismissed observance of the
ritual commandments and Jewish peoplehood as "anachronistic", created a
permanent wedge between the Reform movement and more traditional
American Jews.
In 1886, prominent Sephardic Rabbis Sabato Morais and H. Pereira Mendes
founded the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York City as a more
traditional alternative to Hebrew Union College. The Seminary's brief affiliation
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with the traditional congregations that established the Union of Orthodox
Congregations in 1898 was severed due to the Orthodox rejection of the
Seminary's academic approach to Jewish learning. At the turn of the 20th
century, the Seminary lacked a source of permanent funding and was ordaining
on average no more than one Rabbi per year.
This situation was resolved due to the efforts of Cyrus Adler, professor of
Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University and founder of the Jewish
Publication Society, who convinced a number of wealthy German Reform Jews
including Jacob Schiff, David and Simon Guggenheim, Mayer Sulzberger, and
Louis Marshall, to contribute $500,000 to the faltering JTS.
The fortunes of Conservative Judaism underwent a dramatic turnaround when in
1902, the famed scholar Solomon Schechter, lecturer in Talmud at the
University of Cambridge, accepted the invitation to become president of JTS.
Under Schechter's leadership, JTS attracted a distinguished faculty, including
Louis Ginzberg (author of Legends of the Jews), historian Alexander Marx,
Arabist Israel Friedlander, and future founder of Reconstructionism Mordecai
Kaplan, and became a highly regarded center of Jewish learning. In 1913, the
Conservative Movement founded its congregational arm, the United Synagogue
of America, which would later become the United Synagogue of Conservative
Judaism.
Conservative Judaism enjoyed rapid growth in the first half of the 20th century,
becoming the largest American Jewish denomination. Its combination of
modern innovation (such as mixed gender seating) and traditional practice
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particularly appealed to first and second-generation Eastern European Jewish
immigrants, who found Orthodoxy too restrictive, but Reform Judaism foreign.
After World War II, Conservative Judaism continued to thrive. The 1950s and
early 1960s featured a boom in synagogue construction as upwardly mobile
American Jews moved to the suburbs. Conservative Judaism occupied an
enviable middle position during a period where American society prized
consensus.
In 1973, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of Conservative Judaism
voted to count men and women equally as members of a minyan. There was
also a special commission appointed by the Conservative movement to study
the issue of ordaining women as rabbis, which met between 1977 and 1978, and
consisted of eleven men and three women; the women were Marian Siner
Gordon, an attorney, Rivkah Harris, an Assyriologist, and Francine Klagsbrun,
a writer. In 1983, the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
(one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism), voted, also
without accompanying opinion, to ordain women as rabbis and as cantors. Paula
Hyman, among others, took part in the vote as a member of the JTS faculty.
Amy Eilberg became the first female rabbi ordained in Conservative Judaism in
1985. In 1987 Erica Lippitz and Marla Rosenfeld Barugel became the first
female cantors ordained in Conservative Judaism. However, the Cantors
Assembly, a professional organization of cantors associated with Conservative
Judaism, did not allow women to join until 1990.
By the 1990s Conservative Judaism continued to flourish, yet dichotomies of
practice and belief, which had been present for years, began to formulate. After
a substantial gift from Los Angeles philanthropist Ruth Ziegler, a new
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rabbinical school was formed at the American Jewish University (then
University of Judaism) in Bel Air, California. Established in 1996, the Ziegler
School of Rabbinic Studies became the first independent Jewish seminary to be
established on the west coast. In 2001, all graduates of the Ziegler School were
formally admitted as members of the Rabbinical Assembly.
Working with this 1990s trend of diversity and institutional growth,
Conservative Judaism remained the largest denomination in America, with 43
percent of Jewish households affiliated with a synagogue belonging to
Conservative synagogues (compared to 35 percent for Reform and 16 percent
for Orthodox). In 2000, the NJPS showed that only 33 percent of synagogueaffiliated American Jews belonged to a Conservative synagogue. For the first
time in nearly a century, Conservative Judaism was no longer the largest
denomination in America.
Schisms
The first split in the Conservative coalition occurred in 1963, when followers of
Mordecai Kaplan seceded from the movement to form a distinct
Reconstructionist Judaism. Kaplan had been a leading figure at JTS for 54
years, and had pressed for liturgical reform and innovations in ritual practice
from inside of the framework of Conservative Judaism. Frustrated by the
perceived dominance of the more traditionalist voices at JTS, Kaplan's
followers decided that the ideas of Reconstructionism would be better served
through the creation of a separate denomination. In 1968, the split became
formalized with the establishment of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.
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Another schism in the Conservative ranks, this time from the movement's right
wing, would come when a number of the traditionalist Rabbis led by JTS
Talmudics professor David Weiss Halivni split from the United Synagogue to
form the Union for Traditional Judaism. The dissenters were discontented with
the general leftward trend in USCJ policies over the previous decades, such as
"prayer book revision, egalitarianism, redefining halakhic boundaries of sexual
relationships, and advocacy of Israel accepting conversions that are nonhalakhic even by Conservative standards"., and the Union suggests that "The
Conservative Movement thus appears to endorse the notion that changing
societal norms can supersede the proper application of halakhic sources". The
Union today describes itself as "trans-denominational" and maintains a
Rabbinical seminary, the Institute of Traditional Judaism.
United Kingdom
The Masorti movement did not establish a presence in the United Kingdom until
much later and came about largely because of a series of incidents known
collectively as the "Jacobs affair": Rabbi Louis Jacobs, a leading scholar of
Anglo Jewry, joined the faculty of the Jews College, leaving his post as Rabbi
of the New West End Synagogue, under the impression that he would
eventually be made principal. However, in 1962 the London Beth Din and the
Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie, who formed the leadership of the United Synagogue,
the UK's Orthodox establishment, refused to allow his appointment on grounds
of heresy because in his 1957 book We Have Reason to Believe, Jacobs had
rejected the conception of a literal, verbal revelation of the Torah. In 1964,
when the committee of the New West End Synagogue wanted to reappoint
Jacobs as their rabbi, Brodie again vetoed his appointment on the same grounds.
In response, Jacobs and many of the New West End congregants established the
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New London Synagogue, which became the center of Masorti Judaism in the
United Kingdom.
In the United Kingdom, congregational observance is somewhat more
traditional than in the United States. There are no women serving as
congregational rabbis (though female Rabbis do serve in other roles), for
example, and some Masorti congregations maintain non-egalitarian practices
with regard to gender, such as the mechitza and the prohibition of women
reading from the Torah, while nearly all American congregations are fully
egalitarian and the American Rabbinical schools ordain women as Rabbis.
There are now 13 Masorti congregations in the United Kingdom. British
Masorti rabbis have trained at a number of rabbinical schools, including: the
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Schechter Institute and the Shalom
Hartman Institute both of Jerusalem and Leo Baeck College in London.
Israel
The first Masorti communities in the State of Israel were founded in 1979 by
North American olim. The movement now has some 50 congregations in Israel,
with a membership of approximately 20,000, and its programs reach some
125,000 each year. In addition to its kehillot and chavurot maintains a kibbutz
(Kibbutz Hanaton), a moshav (Moshav Shorashim), and IDF Garinim, Masorti
groups within the Israeli Defense Forces. The organization is active in
integrating olim from South America and the former Soviet Union into Israeli
society—native Israelis and olim from non-English speaking countries now
make up about 60% of the Israeli Masorti population, the remaining 40% are
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North American olim. The movement is supported by the Masorti Foundation
for Conservative Judaism in Israel, an American organization that provides
funding to Masorti programs, which are disadvantaged by the Israeli
government's practice of funding only Orthodox institutions.
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