The Rabbinical Council of America announced here today creation of a committee of scholars and rabbis to formulate a course of action to arrest the rising incidence of mixed marriage and alienation of Jewish youth from Judaism.
Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld of New York, newly elected president of the 1000-member Orthodox rabbinical group, told the 38th annual RCA convention that the committee will be headed by Dr. Norman Lamm, professor of Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University; Dr. Simon Lopata, professor of economics at St. John’s University in New York; and Dr. Joseph Kaminetsky, director of Torah Umesorah, the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools.
Rabbi Schonfeld said the committee would study in depth the “fundamental motivations which determine why young students tend to abandon traditional Judaism in the realm of marriage and other social areas.” He said the RCA would cooperate with Yavneh, a Jewish Orthodox youth movement, and the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations.
He said mixed marriages on American campuses had reached “alarming proportions,” and constituted “the greatest challenge to the continuity of the Jewish community in this country” and “a serious menace to the very survival of traditional Judaism.” He cited a survey which he said indicated that in the national capital, with a population of more than 100,000 Jews, more than 30 percent of children of American-born Jewish parents marry non-Jews and that rates as high as 40 percent had been reported in Iowa and Indiana.
Rabbi Schonfeld cited a report that 41 percent of Reform rabbis had indicated their readiness to solemnize mixed marriages and said “we must admonish them to desist from paving the road to assimilation.” Such “religious liberalism.” he said, was suicidal to “the perpetuation of American Jewry.”
Rabbi Bernard Twersky, the RCA press officer, said the new committee would create centers to advise young college students and adults on the problems of a changing American environment, mobilize community resources to combat mixed marriage, and hold periodic meetings of American rabbinical and communal leaders with college youth groups to assess the progress made to slow the rate of mixed marriage.
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