Union of American Hebrew Congregations Answers Houston Criticism

The Union of American Hebrew Congregations today made public its reply to a resolution criticizing it, recently adopted by congregation Beth Israel of Houston, Texas.

To the Houston demand that the UAHC withdraw from the American Jewish Conference, the resolution points out that “by giving adequate publicity to our position on of neutrality, we are enabled to remain in the Conference in order to participate in other vital activities as have other organizations faced with the same problem.”

The UAHC statement declares that “the Executive Board of the Union unequivocally rejects the suggestion that it should employ or refuse to employ its professional workers on the ground of either their anti-Zionism or their Zionism. We consider such discrimination to be both un-Jewish and un-American. It violates the very freedoms for which we are at present fighting.”

In answering the charge, raised by the Houston congregation, that “a large share of the retrogression that has taken place in Reform Judaism must be considered dereliction of leadership upon the part of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations,” the committee observed that the UAHC has consistently lived up to the highest principles of Reform as taught by Isaac Mayer Wise, founder of the UAHC and the Hebrew Union College; by Kaufmenn Kohler and other great Rabbis of their day and of the present.

In reply to the Houston objection to the use of the word “Liberal” instead of “Reform,” the Committee pointed out that Isaac Mayer Wise had himself stated that “progressive Judaism would be a better designation than Reformed Judaism;” further that the World Union for Progressive Judaism, at its organization meeting in 1926, in which outstanding leaders of American Reform Judaism participated actively, adopted its name unanimously, “employing the term, ‘Progressive’ rather than ‘Reform’ as being the most descriptive of our movement.”

The reply, issued by the executive board of the UAHC, was prepared by a committee consisting of Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, Director of the UAHC; Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis; Lestter A. Jaffe, vice-chairman of the Board of Governors of the Hebrew Union College; Rabbi Julian Morgenstern, president of the Hebrew Union College; Adolph Rosenberg, president of the UAHC and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, vice-president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis.