JTS Head Agrees to Defer Decision Until Next Year on Accepting Women for Ordination As Rabbis

Requests by faculty members of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) to defer until early next year action on whether to accept women as candidates for the Conservative rabbinate have been acceded to by Chancellor Gerson Cohen. He said a vote scheduled for May 30 on the recommendation of a special commission that the JTS accept women as rabbinical candidates had been cancelled to permit time for more faculty debate.

Delegates to the 1977 convention of the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), the association of Conservative rabbis, approved a resolution to admit women to the JTS rabbinical school but withdrew it when Cohen promised to name a commission, comprised of 14 members representing the entire spectrum of Conservative opinion, with himself as chairman, to study the issue and make recommendations.

Cohen promised the 1977 convention that he would commit himself to bringing the findings of the commission to the JTS Senate, the academic policy-making body of the JTS, to act on the commission’s finding. In announcing the postponement, in a letter dated April 27, Cohen declared he was “taking this opportunity to let you know that we expect to take a definite stand on the issue for the academic year 1980-81.”

Last January, the commission, in its final report, submitted a recommendation to the 79th RA convention in Los Angeles, declaring it found no reason in Jewish religious law barring women from the rabbinate and recommending that “qualified women be ordained as rabbis” in the Conservative Movement. Three of the 14 commission members dissented, suggesting that appropriate roles short of ordination could be created for Jewish women.

WILL CONDUCT IN-DEPTH DISCUSSION

Cohen, in his April 27 letter, said he had decided to delay the decision to submit the recommendation to the JTS Senate “because of the seriousness of the issue and because of faculty sensitivity to the difficulty inherent in separating ordination from halachic considerations, ” which had led faculty members “on both sides” to ask time “to submit position papers for Senate consideration.”

The majority report urged that the revision of the JTS rabbinical school policy barring women be accomplished promptly “to allow applications from women for the academic year beginning in September 1979.”

Cohen said in his letter that next January the Senate would “devote several days to an in-depth discussion of the question and to a resolution of the faculty’s posture. ” He said the new schedule calls for submission of written arguments by Dec. I and the special meetings of the Senate during late December and January. In his letter, Cohen issued an oblique warning that “public debate ” on the differences of viewpoint on the issue “could only be divisive.”