Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut, of Toronto, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the association of American Reform rabbis, said today that the convention delegates had decided to table a motion assailing the Hasidic Lubavitcher movement’s out-reach program “to reduce the tensions within the Jewish community and to re-emphasize the needs of Klal Yisroel at this critical hour.”
Plaut, who was re-elected to a second term as president at the CCAR 95th annual meeting at Grosinger’s Hotel in Liberty, N.Y. prepared his statement at the request of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The vote yesterday to table, 88 to 65 was for a motion that said there were growing strains between Jewish students involved in the Lubavitch College out-reach program and their non-Orthodox parents.
An earlier version of the resolution was sharply critical of the Lubavitch out-reach program, comparing its methods to those of cult groups and accusing its leaders of driving wedges between young non-Orthodox Jews and their families. The resolutions committee submitted a milder statement, noting the alleged conflict and urging talks between the Reform and Lubavitch movements to resolve the conflict.
Plaut’s complete statement was that “despite a discemible desire on the part of many members to assert the authenticity of Reform, there was a larger overriding sentiment that prevailed; to reduce the tensions within the Jewish community, and to emphasize the needs of Klal Yisroel at this critical time.”
LUBAVITCH CALL IT ‘REGRETTABLE’
Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, a spokesman for the Lubavitch movement, declared at the movement’s headquarters in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, after the vote to table, that he was “glad the matter has been put to rest,” adding it was “regrettable it had ever come up.” He called the harsh original version, which had been widely publicized before the CCAR convention opened, “outrageous, libelous and very divisive.”
Krinsky added that he had not seen any public statement from any Jewish organization “countering this slur. ” He compared it with Jewish reaction to the “Hymietown” remarks of Democratic Presidential aspirant Rev. Jesse Jackson, which he said he felt were “innocuous,” while the Reform resolution, in its initial version, was “very divisive” and one which could have caused “irreparable harm” to the Jewish community.
He said the Lubavitch outreach program on campuses throughout the world, much of it aimed at unaffiliated or disaffected Jewish students, “has been successful with every kind of Jews” and that many Reform students had been helped.
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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.
