Mandell Ganchrow wants Young Israel and he wants it badly. Problem is, Young Israel does not want him.
Ganchrow, the president of the Orthodox Union, has been calling for a merger with the National Council of Young Israel since has was elected to head the flagship organization of the centrist Orthodox world in November 1994.
And at the O.U.’s annual dinner Sunday, he repeated his call.
“It is my hope that Young Israel leaders will come to the same conclusion that I have – enough of duplication, enough of waste, enough of competition. The time for merger is now, and it should be done in a brotherly, open and warm fashion,” Ganchrow said in an interview after the dinner.
The leaders of Young Israel, however, are not interested.
“Absolutely under no circumstances” will Young Israel merge with the O.U., said Young Israel President Chaim Kaminetzky, citing divergent Orthodox ideologies that would make a merger impossible.
The conflict between the two Orthodox synagogue umbrella bodies reflects the cementing of ideological shifts in the Orthodox world and the inherent tension between the philosophies that each organization’s leader says he represents.
Ganchrow says 90 percent of Young Israel-affiliated congregants share the same centrist religious philosophy as O.U. member congregations.
But Kaminetzky sharply disagrees, saying that Young Israel’s philosophy is a more right-wing interpretation of what Orthodox requires of its adherents and a more aggressive Zionist nationalism.
Although secret merger talks dating back eight years broke off about 18 months ago, Ganchrow is optimistic about an eventual merger.
“I would love it to come from the top, and I still hope it could happen. But if it doesn’t happen that way, I’m calling for a grass-roots type of reaction,” Ganchrow said. When 50 Young Israel synagogues are O.U. members “that reaction will be inevitable.”
At the O.U.’s dinner, Ganchrow announced that the O.U. recently accepted into membership their 29th and 30th Young Israel synagogues and said he expects to achieve his goal of 50 in two years.
But this trend has not weakened Young Israel’s membership ranks, as all the synagogues joining O.U. have maintained their Young Israel affiliation.
“Obviously we are better and different” than the O.U., Kaminetzky said in an interview.
“We know who our rabbinic leaders are. I don’t believe that other Orthodox organizations have rabbinic input into their organizational life.”
Young Israel synagogues have closed parking lots on Shabbat and holy days, Kaminetzky said, and all member congregations have mechitzahs, the walls that separate men from women in Orthodox synagogues so that, during their prayers, men are nor distracted by the women.
Ganchrow said the O.U. dropped six congregations because they refused to install mechitzahs, but four of the O.U.’s thousands member still do not have mechitzahs.
They remain O.U. members “because they have youth groups and we’d be afraid that the Conservative movement would come in and take them over” if the O.U., and its National Conference of Synagogue Youth, dropped them, he said.
But in any case, “We don’t check the tzitzit of every Jew,” Ganchrow said.
Kaminetzky, however, said that at Young Israel, “we do check people’s tzitzit.”
“We have very strict requirements and watch our synagogues the way you watch your children,” he said.
The two organizations also diverge on the ways they approach Israel advocacy.
Young Israel is ardent in its defense of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights and has organized demonstrations on their behalf.
The O.U.’s approach is to work with the Israeli government, which “doesn’t that we agree with them,” said Ganchrow.
The O.U. meets with Israeli prime ministers “to present the arguments on behalf of everything out community believes in, including an undivided Jerusalem and the sanctity of the sites in Hebron and the Temple Mount,” he said.
“You don’t always have to represent your people with vehemence and loud noises and demonstrations to do a good job,” said Ganchrow.
Ganchrow said he proudly calls himself a modern Orthodox Jew, a term that has recently fallen out of widespread use in favor of the term “centrist Orthodox.”
He acknowledged that modern Orthodox organizations have lost the power to steer the philosophical direction of the Orthodox world.
“We have lost the moral center to the right, and I am working feverishly to keep the O.U. on the center path,” Ganchrow said. “Those of us who consider ourselves centrist are no less Orthodox Jews than anyone else.
“How religious a person is between that person and God. We don’t have parking lot police. Our goal is to provide an Orthodox service and to hope that the standard of each and every Jew will be improved.”
The merger discussions ended some 18 months ago when Young Israel’s board of directors made clear that is was not interested, according to Kaminetzky.
Ganchrow says Young Israel got “scared by the diversity and size of the two organizations, that they might be submerged.”
And at one level, he’s probably right, say people familiar with the discussions.
The O.U. has an annual budget of about $20 million, 800 employees and about 1,000 member synagogues.
The National Council of Young Israel has a budget of about $1.5 million, 18 employees and 146 member synagogues.
Just over half of the O.U.’s budget comes from traditional fund raising. The rest comes from its kashrut division, which supervises 150,000 different items produced by 3,000 food production plants, Ganchrow said.
Young Israel is now working hard to get into the highly profitable kashrut business, too. Just before Passover, it struck a deal with the Star- K supervision agency, which is based in Baltimore, to market the agency’s services.
In the last two months, a dozen food producers have signed on with Star- K through Young Israel, said Kaminetzky.
“Some have come to us that are unhappy with other certification agencies, including the O.U.,” said Rabbi Pesach Lerner, national executive director of Young Israel.
The O.U. does not feel threatened, insists Ganchrow. “We have name recognition. We’re twice as large as all the other kashrus organizations put together.”
“We’ve never, ever been interested in a monopoly. We have always worked with every single legitimate kashrus organization, we work together and have always gone out of our way to support local Vaads [supervision agencies],” he said.
But “our problem was the question of confusion,” he said. “We don’t want competition that will confuse the public, people trying to undersell and make a business out of it.”
Why is Ganchrow so ardently pursuing an organization that has made it clear it wants little to do with him?
A high-ranking Young Israel source said that until about five years ago, Young Israel was “a sleeping giant.” “Now Young Israel is increasing its shuls and rabbinic training and services to congregations, and the big guy on the block isn’t any longer the big guy,” he said.
Ganchrow insists that he feels compelled by his sense of communal responsibility.
“Maybe it’s not the most politic thing to stand up and say we should have a merger, but I think the Orthodox community needs it. A few people are going to be upset, but we have to do the right thing,” he said.
Said Kaminetzky, “The organizations need to be different. We’re the only ones who can get to a rabbinic conference the deans of Yeshiva University and members of the [fervently Orthodox] Agudah.
“The American Orthodox community needs that uniqueness.”
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