Disputes Claims Reform Would Ease Trials of Persecuted Russian Jews

means of rescue there be—of Judaism in Russia. I thought that your first impulse would be to offer instantaneous cooperation and to condemn most emphatically the denial of the elemental right of freedom of worship and belief, even if such denial did not affect the Jews and only imposed hardships and mental agony upon Christians and Mohammedans dwelling under the Russian regime. To my utter amazement, you responded with a polemical letter raising the question of Reform versus Orthodoxy, under circumstances which will make many of our people think that you are seeking to take advantage of the tragic dilemma of Jews who are to a large extent Orthodox, and that you are callously indifferent to the destruction of Orthodoxy even when that also means the destruction of the Jews who cherish this form of belief and practice.

Once more I think your attitude is as inexplicable as it is entirely unprecedented, for the situation here described is not at all as you say “a repetition, though upon a larger and more extreme scale, of what happened in Central Europe a century or so ago.” The terrible plight of the Jews in Russia suggests the Spanish Inquisition more closely than any other somber historic era and, though I would not like to believe that you intended any such thing, it is unthinkably cruel to temper our indignation or to withhold our help on the ground of differences of opinion with regard to exposition of the Jewish faith.

But since you have brought in the matter of Reform, I would like to say this additional word. If after a half a century or more of preaching and practicing Reform an eminent spokesman of this wing of Jewry fails to understand the plain and direct language—the agonizing cry—of a Russian Jew who writes to you with regard to an overwhelming calamity which has overtaken our people in his native land, what can after that be said of Reform as a beneficent illuminating and uplifting influence in Jewish life? Where is the quickness of perception which Reform has engendered, the keen sensibilities which it has kindled, the faculties to think as Jews which it has sharpened? What convincing argument could you present in favor of your views to Jewish men and women who came out of the Russian Ghetto and who may, nevertheless, be inclined to be sympathetic to certain aspects of the Reform position and who in any even may recognize the desirability of a modern interpretation of our religious beliefs or of a fusion of the new and the old in some synthetic, regenerative ideal for modern Israel?

Is not a crisis such as I have placed before you a real test of the understanding, the tolerance, the courage that is back of an idea? You could not have intended to place before Jewish men and women of all shades of religious belief the gloomy and forbidding picture of Reform which emerges out of your letter. I would not like to think that you have been as unjust to Reform as you have been inconsiderate of the spiritual sufferings of Russian Jewry.

Yours very truly,

Bernard G. Richards.