Conservative Sees Rabbis ‘unprepared’ for ‘rush’ to Synagogues

“Tens of thousands of American Jews are running toward the synagogue,” while rabbis and congregations are often unprepared to cope with the phenomenon, Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, executive vice-president of the Rabbinical Assembly, told the opening session of the annual convention of the Conservative spiritual leaders here tonight. That phenomenon, he said, constitutes the problem facing the American Jewish community today, rather than assimilation, intermarriage or “Jews running away from Judaism” as many believe.

Rabbi Kelman’s views were contained in his annual report to the 1962 Convention which will continue through Thursday. More than 400 rabbis from the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico are in attendance. The principal theme of this year’s convention is Jewish education, and a program for the Conservative movement will be hammered out in the four major sessions and several workshops devoted to the subject. A call for an “extraordinary conference” of all religious groups to deal with the problem of Jewish education in America is expected to come from the convention, according to the president of the Assembly, Rabbi Edward T. Sandrow.

Rabbi Kelman, in his annual report, said that those “running towards the synagogue” are looking for “stronger identification with our tradition and for answers to their many problems, or often just to find out what they should be perplexed about.” He said “we are baffled because we have been overwhelmed by this mass looking to us, and many of us feel so inadequate and unprepared to answer. ” The current generation “may be identified as one which doubts its doubt, and is prepared to give the sympathetic benefit of its doubts in the direction of our tradition. They look to the rabbis as a source of awareness and guidance. “

“We know all too well how preoccupied we were with the devastation of Hitler and our commitment to the rebuilding of Israel, ” he said. “In less than three decades we have had to experience horrors and triumphs of history, experienced by other peoples over many centuries. It has been hard to digest and cope with the many problems and challenges of this experience. Theological problems and sociological revolutions which other communities dealt with over centuries and generations we have had to deal with in months and years. We are finally beginning to catch our breath and realize how many unsolved problems we must still face.”

He said he was encouraged by the fact that the convention was devoting its main ef-forts to Jewish education. The Conservative movement has always given this high priority, “but I hope that we will now concentrate on the quality and content of Jewish education more than on the mere physical fact of getting our children to school for more hours in pleasant surroundings,” he declared.

SINGLE EDUCATION FORMULA OPPOSED BY CONSERVATIVES, RABBI SANDROW SAYS

According to Rabbi Sandrow, many rabbis in the Conservative movement are not enamored of the present campaign to establish a single educational formula for the world. “Education cannot be neutral,” he said, “and any such attempt would have to be a compromise of several trends of Judaism, and therefore ‘neutral.’ We want everyone to express his point of view, and we will articulate ours. What we want is our chance to try to create our vision of a human being alongside the attempt by the Orthodox and Reform to do the same. Orthodox Jews would run schools one way, Reform Jews another, and we still another, and no synthesis could please any of us.

“We do not want to ‘flatten out’ Jewish education. But this must not be construed as meaning that we do not want Jewish unity. However, any attempts to achieve a unified curriculum for Jewish religious schools, to my mind, is something less than democratic. Each group must aspire to its own goal. We must create authentic Orthodox, Reform and Conservative education.”

It is known here that the Rabbinical Assembly does not favor the International Conference on Jewish Education, sponsored by the Conference of Jewish Organizations, scheduled to be held in Jerusalem in August.