Schindler Speech to Reform Rabbis Draws Sharp Criticism from Orthodox

A strongly worded sermon Friday night by Reform leader Rabbi Alexander Schindler has come under sharp criticism from Orthodox organizations.

Schindler, addressing more than 600 Reform rabbis at the centennial convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, said that the spirit of modern Reform Judaism must be preserved and the movement must stand by its most controversial decisions against criticism from more traditional Jews.

“Our forbears did not forge Reform Judaism to have us trade it in for a tinsel imitation of Orthodoxy,” said Schindler, who is president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Schindler’s remarks were characterized as a “shameful, ugly, indefensible and false attack on Orthodoxy” by Rabbi Pinchas Stolper, executive vice president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

Both Stolper and Rabbi Moshe Sherer, of the Agudath Israel movement, said that Schindler’s statements indicate he is under mounting pressure from elements within the Reform movement to reevaluate his stand on patrilineal descent.

In a radical departure from traditional Judaism, the Central Conference of American Rabbis decided in 1983 that children of mixed marriages would be recognized as Jewish, even through the father’s lineage.

“I think that Rabbi Schindler’s shrill attack against Orthodoxy can only be explained by he himself being frightened by the growing voices in his own camp that warn him he is leading the Reform movement to a point of no return,” said Sherer.

Stolper urged Schindler to “heed the voices” in the Reform movement that call for a re-evaluation of the “self-destructive policies of accommodation to intermarriage and assimilation.”

‘STOP ROMANTICIZING ORTHODOXY’

In his sermon, Schindler exhorted the rabbis to stop “romanticizing Orthodoxy.”

“Where it alone prevails,” he said, “stale repression, fossilized tradition and ethical corruption often holds sway. There is the danger in Israel today, is it not?”

Giving in to pressure from more traditional streams of Judaism on issues like patrilineal descent would mean, Schindler warned, that “we will only demean ourselves and lose our distinctive character.”

Schindler said Reform rabbis should not be “snared by the delusion that a retreat on such issues as patrilineality will gain us the acceptance of the more traditionally inclined in Israel or anywhere else.”

“Only total surrender,” Schindler said, “will have such an effect in that arena.”

Sherer admitted that the Reform movement would be not accepted among the Orthodox even if it renounced patrilineal descent, because of Reform’s abandonment of halacha (traditional Jewish law.)

But, he said, “it would at least continue the acceptance of Reform Jews as Jews.”

If the Reform movement continues to recognize patrilineal descent, Sherer said, the Jewish people would be torn into “two segments that cannot even intermarry.”