NEWS STORY: Intermarriage continues to bedevil Reform Judaism

c. 1996 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Though the lay leadership of Reform Judaism has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal that would have encouraged the movement’s rabbis to officiate at interfaith weddings, it hardly puts the issue to rest for the country’s largest Jewish denomination. The tension between rabbis and congregants on the issue, in fact, […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Though the lay leadership of Reform Judaism has overwhelmingly rejected a proposal that would have encouraged the movement’s rabbis to officiate at interfaith weddings, it hardly puts the issue to rest for the country’s largest Jewish denomination.

The tension between rabbis and congregants on the issue, in fact, has been going on for years. And despite the 170-12 vote last week by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations’ board of trustees to reject the proposal at their meeting in Los Angeles, the conflict shows no signs of abating.


Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the UAHC, said in an interview that the conflict had threatened the movement’s unity and he welcomed the decision. In his view, it is possible to reconcile both a welcoming approach to intermarried couples and a rejection of Reform rabbinic officiation at such unions.”I reject the notion that trying to include interfaith families in synagogue life is a statement that therefore one has no standards, or that it necessarily leads to officiation at intermarriages,”he said.

The question of whether or not rabbis should officiate at interfaith marriages is perhaps more critical to the Reform movement, which for the last two decades has made outreach to intermarried families one of its priorities, more so than any other Jewish denomination.

In almost all of the movement’s 850 congregations, which together have some 1.3 million members, a substantial proportion of congregants have spouses who decline to convert to Judaism, or have children with non-Jewish spouses.

A nationwide study of American Jews in 1990 found that 62 percent of Reform Jews who had wed in the preceeding several years had married non-Jews.

High rates of intermarriage is a longstanding trend in the Reform movement, which led its leadership to adopt a new definition of Jewishness in 1983.

Traditionally, Jewishness is defined as coming through the mother in what is known as”matrilineal descent.”By its 1983 expansion of that definition to include”patrilineal descent,”the Reform movement made official what had been the practice in many Reform congregations for more than a decade. Now the movement considers a child Jewish if either parent is Jewish, as long as the child is raised and educated as a Jew.

Adopting”patrilineal descent”marked a critical break with the traditional definition of Jewishness accepted by the rest of the Jewish community for thousands of years.


Opening its doors to interfaith families has made the Reform movement a haven for intermarried couples, who comprise a growing segment of the American Jewish community. A 1990 Jewish population study found that just over half of all Jews who had married within the previous five years had married non-Jews.

The welcoming and inclusive approach has also led to some unanticipated challenges, such as the role non-Jews should play in synagogue life.

Despite the fact that they are sometimes church-going Christians, the non-Jewish parents want to play a central role at the bar- and bat-mitzvah ceremonies of their children. Some want to play leadership roles in congregational organizations.

A more common way in which the tensions play out is the clash over rabbinic officiation at interfaith weddings.

A survey conducted last March by Reform Rabbi Irwin Fishbein of the Rabbinic Center for Research and Counseling in Westfield, N.J., found that 48 percent of his colleagues are willing to officiate at interfaith unions. The other 52 percent said that they do not officiate, though most indicated that they refer couples to another rabbi who does.

This difference of opinion results in conflicting customs. In Boston, for example, it is nearly impossible to find a Reform rabbi willing to officiate at an intermarriage. However, in cities mostly outside of the Northeast, it is relatively easy to find a rabbi to officiate at a mixed marriage ceremony.


Although there are a number of Reform clergy who make themselves available to perform intermarriages _ for which they collect sums as high as $1,500 _ for most Reform rabbis it is a serious and painful issue.

And for many it is not a simple issue. Some say they have a rule against officiating but have made exceptions for people with whom they are very close, and who they are convinced will raise their children as Jews.

Fishbein’s study found an increase of 4 percent in the number of rabbis willing to officiate at such weddings since 1990.

The Reform rabbinical association, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), adopted a policy in 1973 urging its members not to officiate at such weddings, but leaves to each rabbi to follow his or her conscience. The Conservative and Orthodox movements do not permit their rabbis to conduct interfaith weddings.

The Reform movement’s tension, between welcoming interfaith couples and a new surge of interest within the movement to pursue Jewish spiritual authenticity, means rabbis are often caught between pressure from their congregants to officiate and the need to establish the boundary of what Judaism does not permit.

The conflict often plays out in painful ways inside synagogues.

Many temple search committees, for example, are now using as an employment litmus test the question of whether a rabbi is willing to officiate at intermarriages.


And there have been cases in which rabbis’ contracts have not been renewed on the basis of their stance on the question, said Rabbi Elliot Stevens, executive secretary of the CCAR.

Some rabbis at the CCAR annual convention, held last March in Philadelphia, said they had been denied tenure or had their job security threatened over the issue.

A survey of Reform temple members surveyed by the Jewish Outreach Institute (JOI) showed that three-quarters want their rabbi to officiate at interfaith marriages.

JOI, a Manhattan-based research organization that also serves as a clearinghouse of information for interfaith couples, is chaired by David Belin, who also introduced the resolution urging rabbinic officiation to the Reform movement’s board of trustees. Belin, a Des Moines, Iowa, attorney, is also an honorary vice chair of the UAHC’s board of trustees.

Belin said he was”very disappointed”with the rejection of his proposal.”It did not reflect the views of the overwhelming majority of Reform Jews,”he said.”I believe that religion is for the people.”

MJP END NUSSBAUM

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