A leading Orthodox rabbi warned here today that American Orthodox Jewry “is facing formidable challenges from the secular, the uninterested, the ‘turned off’ and the feminist movement.”
Rabbi Gilbert klaperman, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, told the opening session of the organization’s three -day midwinter conference, that “unless we recognize that these challenges raise legitimate problems for organized religion, we will lose the opportunity to hold the line against defections.”
He said the synagogue “must reassess its traditional role and develop surrogate services for the singles, the poor, the disadvantaged, the unlettered and the alienated. We must reach out to the lonely and the wandering.”
MUST COMMUNICATE WITH CHRISTION COMMUNITY
Dealing with a major topic of the conference, “The Synagogue and its Relationship with the Non-Jewish Community,” Klaperman told the several hundred rabbis from across the country attending the conference that “we must communicate with the Christion community. There is increasing polarization and consequent tension between the religions and the races which must be diminished and resolved.”
He cited anti-Semitic flareups, the daubing of swastikas on walls of synagouge buildings, and tensions between Blacks and whites. “We may not all believe the same, but we must learn to live side by side in harmony,” Klaperman said.
He emphasized that the synagogue must reassess its long-time reluctance to express its opinion on political matters and that the Rabbinical Council of America should be prepared to make clear and meaningful statements on the sanctity of life, the issues of peace and nuclear proliferation.
“The synagogue sanctuary is no longer isolated from the impact of the political arena,” Klaperman said. “Religion has much to say about exonomic security, health, poverty, and morality in government and international affairs.”
He cited the fact that when he called last year for a nuclear freeze, he was widely criticized for using a religious platform to “meddle in a political issue.” Nevertheless, Klaperman said, world survival is a political matter and religion has something meaningful “to say about the morality and threat of human extinction.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
