Growing Tensions Between Congregations, Rabbis Threaten Future Synagogue Life

Members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform Judaism) were told today that growing tensions between congregations and their rabbis threaten the future of synagogue life in America. Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn of Boston, president of the CCAR, and Rabbi David Polish of Evanston, III., incoming president, told the opening session of the 82nd annual meeting of the Conference that the time has come for laymen to end “unwarranted assault and denigration within our synagogues” as they issued a call for remedial action. Although the problem has received considerable attention in Christianity, with regard to relations between ministers and priests and their congregants, this is the first time the issue has been openly discussed in Judaism in this country. Both rabbis placed equal blame upon rabbis and lay leaders. Rabbi Gittelsohn said rabbis are known to have been “arrogant, abusive and unforgivably contemptuous toward their congregants, and some act as if congregations exist chiefly for the gratification and fulfillment of their egos.” Both rabbis attacked lay leaders for fostering what they said was becoming a national scandal that, if unchecked, could corrode not only the rabbinate but congregations as well.

The harassment and tyrannization of rabbis at the hands of lay leaders who have jeopardized, and sometimes shattered, their tenures and threatened, and sometimes destroyed, the careers of their rabbis, will drive able men out of the rabbinate and validate the cynicism of their critics, the rabbis added. “If this is what American Jewry wants, this is what it will get–craven, mediocre, servile persons who will dutifully preside at the burial services of American Jewry,” Rabbi Polish observed. One of the major factors in the developing rift, according to the speakers, is a growing challenge of rabbis by laymen on interpretation of religious law. Other factors are the drifting of Jewish youth away from the synagogue–seen as leading to the mounting incidence of intermarriage in which the rabbi is charged with lessening influence and authority; the economic recession that has caused many laymen to question the continuing validity of some congregational problems, and the decline of urban congregations and the effect on religious school registration, which is viewed as a portent of a future filled with near-vacant synagogues and temples.

Rabbis Gittelsohn and Polish called for a special committee to consult with the major institutions of American Reform Judaism–the CCAR, Union of American Hebrew Congregations (congregational body of Reform Judaism) and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (seminary)–to develop a program for preventing lay-rabbinic conflict, possibly with direct involvement between rabbis and congregations, “before the atmosphere has become contaminated beyond redemption.” The rabbis also urged “that before any congregation is panelled for a pulpit vacancy it be required to hold a seminar with one or more members of the Commission, concentrating on the specific needs of that congregation and the priority of criteria to be followed in search for a new rabbi; that the UAHC enact disciplinary measures against congregations found to be unethical or unfair in their treatment of rabbis–including expulsion from the Union as a final resort–and that by the same token the Conference undertake to counsel and discipline rabbis found to violate professional and moral responsibilities toward their congregations; and that the CCAR and the Placement Commission refuse to offer rabbinic services to any congregation which has flagrantly violated its responsibilities to a previous rabbi.” “In the last analysis,” they declared, “no one will firmly respect our rabbinic rights if we do not do so ourselves.”