c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Reform Judaism-the faith’s largest branch in North America with some 1.4-million members-has long been characterized by its liberal approach to interfaith marriages, accepting them as a fact of life in an open society.

Currently, about 60 percent of Reform Jews are marrying non-Jews. In some southern and western states, the rate tops 75 percent.

For many Jews, the high intermarriage rate is a clear sign of their acceptance by an overwhelmingly Christian nation. But for some Reform leaders, the growing number of interfaith unions is an ominous sign of an assimilation that threatens to dilute the religious distinctiveness of their nearly 200-year-old movement.

The latest indication of this concern could be seen this week at the annual gathering of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the movement’s rabbinic body.

Meeting in Philadelphia, the group heard its president strongly criticize those rabbis willing to marry interfaith couples who do not first agree to establish a Jewish home and raise their children as Jews.

They also heard Rabbi Simeon J. Maslin, CCAR president, denounce the growing pressure that many Reform Jews are putting on their rabbis to conduct interfaith weddings.”… When they begin to exert pressure-economic pressure, tenure pressure or ill-conceived releases to newspapers-believing that they know better than the rabbis who have had to agonize over the years with families whom they love but whose sons or daughters they cannot marry-such pressures on rabbis are reprehensible,”said Maslin, who is from Elkins Park, Pa.

Among Judaism’s four major branches, only Reform and the small Reconstructionist movement allow rabbis to perform interfaith weddings. Conservative and Orthodox rabbis are prohibited from doing so by their more traditional rabbinic organizations.

In 1973, the CCAR, which represents about 1,750 Reform rabbis in the United States and Canada, passed a resolution urging its members not to perform weddings for interfaith couples, calling such marriages”contrary to the Jewish tradition.” But a decade later, under mounting pressure from congregants to loosen their standards, the CCAR passed another resolution that said officiating at interfaith weddings was a matter of personal conscience.

Reform rabbis today are often willing to satisfy the overwhelming majority of rank-and-file congregants who want them to marry interfaith couples. Surveys have shown that as many as 90 percent of Reform Jews want their rabbis to perform interfaith weddings-a clear rejection of the disdain with which traditional Judaism has historically looked upon such marriages. “The simple fact is that Jewish parents would rather see their children marry a non-Jew than not marry at all,”said Egon Mayer, director of New York’s Jewish Outreach Institute, which does research on intermarriages.”They want their rabbis to officiate because, despite everything they know about the traditional Jewish view of intermarriage, they want to believe that their children have done nothing wrong and are accepted by the community.” Reform rabbis who are willing to marry interfaith couples generally say they do so in the hope that their acceptance of the couple will pave the way for the eventual practice of Judaism by the non-Jewish spouse and the couple’s children.

They also maintain that it is hypocritical to be unwilling to marry a couple, yet once they are married try to induce them to join a Reform synagogue.”For me, the fait accompli is the decision to marry,”Memphis Rabbi Harry K. Danziger said at the CCAR convention.”Therefore, my role relates to the outcome of the wedding, not whether it will take place.” Rabbi Irwin Fishbein, director of the Rabbinic Center for Research and Counseling in Westfield, N.J., said”a positive experience with a rabbi can only enhance”the possibility that an interfaith couple will remain open to Judaism.”A negative experience does not guarantee that they will reject Judaism out of hand, but it certainly doesn’t help,”said Fishbein, whose organization publishes a list of rabbis who perform interfaith weddings.

Maslin said that less than 40 percent of all Reform rabbis are willing to perform intermarriages. However, both Mayer and Fishbein, a Reform rabbi, said the percentage is higher.

A recent poll conducted by Fishbein’s research center found that 48 percent of Reform rabbis are willing to marry interfaith couples. Moreover, only 42 percent required a clear commitment from the couple to establish a Jewish home and raise their children as Jews-down from 64 percent in a 1990 survey by the center.

Another survey, released this week by Mayer’s organization, found that 65 percent of Reform rabbis would either refer an interfaith couple to a rabbi who would marry them or perform the ceremony themselves.”Clearly, a substantial number of Reform rabbis are willing to accommodate interfaith couples one way or another,”Mayer said.

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Just how vexing that is to the leadership of the Reform movement was on display in Philadelphia this week, where rabbinic involvement in interfaith weddings was a prime topic of discussion.

Jacqueline S. Guttman, a non-rabbi invited to address the convention, castigated the Reform movement for”hypocritically”setting up”obstacles to men and women who demonstrate their devotion to their Jewish fiances by willingly agreeing to a Jewish wedding.” Guttman, a management consultant in New York, told the group of the rejection her son and his non-Jewish fiance met when they sought a Reform rabbi to marry them.”It was not only our son and daughter-in-law who were alienated, if not from Judaism, then from our synagogue. My husband and I, in our own small way `pillars of the temple,’ were alienated as well,”she said.

But another lay person, also invited to share his views with the rabbis, urged the CCAR not to give in further to pressure to officiate at interfaith weddings.”A rabbi is not the mere equivalent of a justice of the peace,”said George Markley of Fairfield, Conn.”… It is not the rabbi’s obligation to make us feel good all the time.”It is to make us feel Jewish,”said Markley, an attorney.”And that may sometimes mean having to say no.”

MJP END RIFKIN