Focus on Issues Reconstructionist Movement Founder Still Going Strong at the Age of 99

Last June II, one of the most influential scholers in the history of Judaism, Dr. Mordecai Kapian, reached the age of 99. Though he had formally retired from an active role as teacher and public speaker in 1977, Kaplan continues to give lectures and –greets a steady stream of visitors of the home of his second wife in Jerusalem where he has lived since settling in Israel.

The founder of the Reconstructionist Movement made aliya seven years ago, bringing to at least a partial close an extraordinary career as scholar, educator, philosopher and author. He continued in Israel to make public appearances, one of the last formal ones — according to Rabbi Ludwig Nodelmann, president of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation — as a speaker at a reception given for him by a visiting Reconstructionist study mission, in Jerusalem, in July 1977.

GALO RECEPTION ON NOV. 22

Nadelmann also told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the entire year between Kaplan’s 99th and 100th birthdays would be celebrated as “Mordecai Kaplan Centennial Year.” Nadelmann said the centennial year will be launched in the United States with a gala reception at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on Nov. 22.

While specific plans remain to be completed, Nadelmann told the JTA, Kaplan and his second wife will come to the United States during the centennial year to be the honored guests at the Nov. 22 event. Nadelmann said one of four daughters by Kaplan’s first marriage, Hadassah, was coordinating plans for the visit.

Nodelmann, reporting that he had last seen Kaplan in 1977, described Kaplan as mentally alert, though suffering from some of the physical disabilities associated with his advanced years. He is recovering from a broken hip suffered in a fall.

In his something less than total retirement, Nadelmann said, Kaplan is still regularly sought out by visitors to Israel, including the hundreds of rabbis and. Jewish teachers who studied in his classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in Manhattan, where he taught for more than half a century. He was ordained of the JTS in 1902 as a Conservative rabbi.

HISTORY OF STRUGGLE

His ideological history is one of a struggle between the Orthodox belief be was taught and by which he lived, until he decided that such a Jewish outlook was incompatible with the outlook of Jews born and raised in the unique freedom of American life. Out of that struggle, the Reconstructionist philosophy emerged.

Kaplan was described in the June 1980 issue of “The Reconstructionist,” the movement’s organ which he helped found, “as the one man who has taught at least three generation of Jews how to think about Judaism in the modern world.”

The editorial declared that “the century which Rabbi Kaplan’s life has spanned has been, for the world at large and for the Jewish people in particular, on extraordinary one.” In 1881, the Czarist regime issued its May Laws, “cruel edicts which caused a tidal wave of Jewish emigration to the new world.” Kaplan, born in Swenziany, Lithuania in 1881, was one of those thousands of Jews.

“Perhaps no man ever became more obsessed with a cause than he: for him, the cause was the survival of the Jewish people, physically, spiritually, culturally. From heder to yeshiva, from public school to university, from the Jewish Theological Seminary to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, he clung to his single purpose, the reconstruction of Judaism for the Twentieth Century,” the editorial added.

The editorial disclosed that Kaplan had suppressed a temptation “to develop his talent as a sculptor” and forced himself “to turn a deaf ear to the seductive sounds of music — unless from art and music and drama he might draw strength for his battle against the steady disintegration of Jewish life.”

DEVELOPED SOME BASIC CONCEPTS

Among the basic concepts he developed and taught and wrote about for more than half a century were the idea of the organic Jewish community –on American version of the European self-governing Jewish community (kehilla) — and the definition of Judaism as a religious civilization, with its spiritual center in Israel.

Denounced by the Orthodox, who put him in here(excommunication), a somewhat less than drastic ban in the open society, Kaplan has responded in his own unruffled way to those who have honestly differed with him.

The editorial predicted that, in the coming. months, “much will be written and spoken about Dr. Kaplan’s writings, his ideas — even his opponents concede he asked the right questions — the answers he offered, the influence of his thinking and writing, and the nature of the Reconstructionist Movement to which they gave rise. “

STIMULATED THINKING IN NON-ORTHODOX FORUMS

Kaplan originally developed Reconstructionism not as another branch of Judaism but as a stimulation to thinking in non-Orthodox forums. His ideas have profoundly influenced Reform and Conservative Judaism. But the pressures for change which his teachings generated led to the crystallization of the movement in its own institutions.

One was the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ), the pilot Reconstructionist congregation in Manhattan, which Kaplan founded and served as rabbi even while continuing his teaching duties at the JTS and his busy schedule of writing and lecturing.

Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, probably his foremost disciple, also served as rabbi at the SAJ then became president of the steadily growing Reconstructionist Movement and held that position for 20 years. Similarly, in response to persistent requests from Jews who came to consider themselves Reconstructionists and who wanted rabbis taught in that philosophy, Kaplan founded the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia and taught at the college. Eisenstein is now the president of the Rabbinical College.

Kaplan’s first wife, Lena, died in 1958. A year later he met and married his second wife, Rivkah, a long-time Israeli. His first book, published in 1904, was titled, “A New Approach to the Problems of Judaism, ” and was followed by a steady stream of books and articles in which Kaplan developed his philosophy of Judaism.

Until recently, Kaplan directed seminars for Reconstructionist rabbinical candidates during their mandatory year of study in Israel.