c. 2008 Religion News Service

Conservative rabbis name woman to top staff job

NEW YORK (RNS) Twenty-three years after the Conservative Jewish movement began ordaining female rabbis, a woman has been tapped to lead its Rabbinical Assembly.

Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, 43, will become executive vice president of the 1,600-member global body in July, succeeding Rabbi Joel Meyers, who will retire after 20 years in the position.

With this appointment, the Conservative movement becomes the first of the three major streams of Judaism to name a woman to lead the day-to-day operations of a rabbinical association.

Reform rabbis elected a woman, Rabbi Janet Marder of Palo Alto, Calif., to a two-year term as president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 2003. Schonfeld, however, is the first woman named to the top paid staff position.

“I am honored that my colleagues have given me this responsibility to work with them on the behalf of our movement,” Schonfeld said, adding, “One of my major goals is to demonstrate Conservative Judaism as the central address for American Judaism.”

Of the 4.3 million American Jews who belong to a synagogue, about one-third attend a Conservative congregation _ slightly less than Reform movement, but more than the Orthodox, according to the most recent National Jewish Population Survey.

Schonfeld was ordained in 1997 at the Conservatives’ Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She has connections to other streams of Judaism: she is the granddaughter of an Orthodox rabbi, the daughter of secular parents, and the former senior rabbi at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a Manhattan synagogue jointly affiliated with the Reconstructionist and Conservative movements.

In addition to serving as the international association of Conservative rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly works on strengthening interfaith efforts and putting out religious publications, including a new prayer book for the high holidays scheduled for release next year.

As the assembly’s director of rabbinic development since 2001, Schonfeld has helped advance numerous projects, including a study of women rabbis and follow-up programs to further the career advancement of female clergy. Most recently, she has served as liaison to the Hekhsher Tzedek initiative, a project to create a seal to certify kosher foods as the product of ethical workplaces.

“I think that Hekhsher Tzedek is one of Conservative Judaism’s current exemplary contributions to Jewish life,” she said. “It’s an avenue to demonstrate the complete integration between the ethical and the spiritual.”

Schonfeld graduated from Yale University in 1987 and worked as a playwright and teacher. She lives in White Plains, N.Y., with her husband and their two sons.

_ Nicole Neroulias

Conn., Canadian dioceses move toward blessing same-sex couples

(RNS) Episcopalians in Connecticut and two Anglican dioceses in Canada are pushing for more latitude in blessing same-sex couples, despite widespread opposition in the worldwide Anglican Communion to gay and lesbian relationships.

On Saturday (Oct. 25), delegates at the annual convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut voted 174 to 123 to ask Bishop Andrew Smith to allow clergy to officiate at same-sex marriages.

The vote came two weeks after Connecticut’s Supreme Court said it’s unconstitutional to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying.

Smith said he and his advisers will study the matter. Meanwhile, Connecticut priests are allowed to give blessings during same-sex unions under a 2006 policy.

On Friday, Bishop Barry Clarke of the Anglican Church of Canada announced plans to draft rites of blessing in the Diocese of Montreal for gay and lesbian couples who have already married under Canadian civil law.

The Montreal diocese granted permission for clergy to bless same-sex marriages last year but has not initiated the practice, according to the Anglican Journal, the official publication of the Anglican Church of Canada. The dioceses of Niagara, Huron, and an assembly of parishes in British Columbia have passed similar motions without implementing them, according to the journal.

Bishop John Chapman of Ottawa is also pressing this week at a meeting of Canada’s House of Bishops to allow same-sex blessings in his diocese.

The Diocese of New Westminster has permitted the blessings since 2002.

Bishops in the 77 million-member Anglican Communion called for a halt to authorizing rites for same-sex blessings at a meeting last summer in Canterbury, England. Many Anglicans believe homosexual relationships violate biblical morality.

_ Daniel Burke

Queen asked to pardon 17th-century witches

LONDON (RNS) A campaign has been launched in Britain to try to persuade Queen Elizabeth II to grant a royal warrant pardoning more than 400 men and women who were executed as witches in England four centuries ago.

A petition citing eight grave “miscarriages of justice” and bearing hundreds of signatures is on the way to the British government’s justice secretary, Jack Straw, whose support is needed to put the issue of posthumous pardons before the monarch.

John Callow, an historian and a leading British authority on witchcraft in 16th and 17th century Europe, as well as a major force in the campaign, told journalists that “today we are well aware that these (convicted witches) were neither capable of harmful magic nor in league with the Devil.”

In those bygone days, when crops failed, butter would not church and cattle sickened and died, Callow said the blame was heaped on alleged practitioner of witchcraft, and “the results were perjury and delusion on a grand scale.”

The terrible result, he said, was “nothing less than legalized murder.”

The campaigners cited the decision by the Swiss Parliament last August to grant an official pardon to Anna Goeldi, whom experts claim was the last person to be executed as a witch in western Europe, in 1782.

But a similar effort in Scotland, a few weeks ago, met with far less success, when the Scottish Parliament rejected a petition to pardon some 2,000 convicted witches. The parliamentarians ruled that a pardon would be inappropriate since “the people were tried and convicted in the laws at the time.”

The 1735 Witchcraft Act ended the trials in Britain _ if not the controversy.

_ Al Webb

Quote of the Day: Federal appeals court judge Bill Pryor

(RNS) “Whether invocations of `Lord of Lords’ or `the God of Abraham, Isaac and Muhammad’ are `sectarian’ is best left to theologians, not courts of law.”

_ Judge Bill Pryor of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, writing for the majority in a 2-1 decision issued Tuesday (Oct. 28) permitting sectarian prayers at Cobb County, Ga., government meetings.

KRE/RB END RNS