New York Jewish Federation Calls Two Day Parley on Intermarriage

The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York announced today it was sponsoring a two day conference this weekend on intermarriage and the future of the American Jewish community.

A group of 50 rabbis, social scientists and communal leaders have been invited to attend the conference which will be held in Long Beach, N. Y., according to Rabbi Benjamin Z. Kreitman, chairman of the research committee on the Federation’s Commission on Synagogue Relations. He said the conference was called because of concern that a rising rate of intermarriage and a declining rate of births might lead to the disappearance of the Jewish community in this country.

Rabbi Kreitman said recent studies indicated that Judaism was losing 70 percent of children born to mixed marriages and that the Jewish birthrate in the United States was only 2.2 per family compared with 2.8 for Protestants and 3 for Catholics. He added that some projections of this data indicated that by the year 2,000, the number of Jews will drop from 2.9 percent to 1.6 percent of the United States population.

Papers on these issues will be presented by Dr. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement; Dr. Nathan Goldberg, Yeshiva University Sociology Professor; Dr. Alfred Jospe, program and resources director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations; Sanford Sherman, associated director of the Jewish Family Service; and Dr. Robert Gordis, a leading Conservative rabbi.

Rabbi Kreitman said that the goal of the conference is to alert all elements of the Jewish community to the situation and to the need to work together for solutions. He added that the findings of the conference should be of interest to followers of other religions concerned with the problems of intermarriage and waning religious loyalties.