Synagogue Council is Dissolving After 68 Years: New Group to Be Formed

After nearly 70 years as a joint effort of the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements, the Synagogue Council of America has collapsed.

But another organization – minus the Orthodox and including the Reconstructionists – is quickly forming to take its place.

The Synagogue Council’s mandate since its founding in 1926 has been to serve as a forum for interdenominational communication and as a representative of American Jewry in dialogue with other faith communities.

The Synagogue Council has had an ongoing dialogue with the American Catholic Church’s National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and a relationship with the National Council of Churches, which is the umbrella body for dozens of Protestant and Orthodox denominations.

It has also been one of the partners in, and the secretariat for, the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, which represents world Jewry in dealings with the Catholic church.

For the last two-and-a half years, the organization has died a slow death due to lack of funding. It is officially closing its doors this month.

A new president and executive vice president were brought in in October 1993 to try to resuscitate the struggling organization, but to no avail.

“There don’t seem to be enough people who are really interested in maintaining the organization,” said Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, an Orthodox rabbi in Manhattan who has been the council’s president for the last year.

“It doesn’t have a natural constituency of lay people. Those of us who are volunteer leaders have tried very hard, but we can’t keep a float something that isn’t sustained by the community,” said Lookstein.

According to another Synagogue Council official, Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld, the Synagogue Council’s demise stems from the fact that so many Jewish groups are involved in interreligious work.

“The fact is that interreligious work has been conducted for years by the Anti- Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee. Even NJCRAC (The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council) is into the act now,” said Schonfeld, co-chair of the Synagogue Council’s interreligious affairs committee.

“Everyone is doing their own thing and this is why the Synagogue Council didn’t succeed. The American Jewish community is not interested in keeping this going,” he said.

The Synagogue Council’s six membership agencies were the rabbinic and congregational arms of each of the three largest religious movements.

Building consensus among Jews – particularly among representatives of three movements that often take opposing positions on everything from theological to political issues – has never been easy for the Synagogue Council.

Non-Orthodox members of the Synagogue Council have blamed the Orthodox members, who represent the Rabbinical Council of America and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, for part of the collapse.

According to Rabbi Mark Winer, the council’s second vice president and co-chair of its interreligious affairs committee, the Orthodox vetoed a suggestion to move the council’s administrative headquarters temporarily to his offices at a Reform temple in White Plains, N.Y., while more attempts to raise money were made.

Rabbis, Lookstein and Schonfeld, who is also chairman of the RCA’s delegation to the council, denied that the Orthodox caused the agency’s final collapse.

In the meantime, however, Winer is involved in an effort to get a new organization off the ground which will attempt to serve the same role played by the Synagogue Council, with most of the same players – but with a significant addition, a likely significant loss and a new set of ground rules.

The new, as-yet unnamed organization will include the Reconstructionist movement, said Winer.

It is not likely to include the Orthodox movement’s organizations, but may include individual Orthodox rabbis and congregations, he said.

“In short order we will have a new organization up and running,” said Winer.

“The reason we want to create a new one is that the constituent organizations want new ground rules. There will not be the same ability of one organization to veto” a decision, he said.

One of the most controversial elements of the Synagogue Council’s procedures – and some say, the element that paralyzed it – was the right of any one of its constituents to veto a proposal.

In addition, one of the council’s ground rules has been that the council cannot address anything theological in nature, an issue of concern for the Orthodox.

The non-Orthodox members say that the veto was most often used by the Orthodox. Schonfeld says that in his 32 years of participating in the Synagogue Council, it was used mostly by the Reform and Conservative members, and “maybe once” by the Orthodox.

According to Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, executive vice president of the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havurot, the movement applied twice for membership to the Synagogue Council, and was twice vetoed by its Orthodox members.

“The Synagogue Council was an artificial organization because the Orthodox maintained a stranglehold over it, not allowing any substantive discussion and preventing any real interfaith dialogue,” said Liebling.

“The Synagogue Council was an empty shell functioning as a symbol of Jewish unity that really didn’t exist,” he said. “We would be happy to be part of any liberal synagogue coalition.”

One Orthodox Synagogue Council representative wished the new organization luck, but did not indicate an interest in participating.

“If they succeed, fine,” said Schonfeld.

The Synagogue Council has long been plagued by financial troubles.

Each of its constituent agencies is supposed to contribute several thousands of dollars a year in dues, with some other funding coming from Jewish federations and private contributions.

The Synagogue Council’s 1994 budget was about $200,000, said Lookstein, which is considerably lower than its operating budget of recent years, when it hovered at about $400,000 per year.

Lookstein said that the Synagogue Council has debts of about $100,000, in part owed to the Jewish fraternal organization B’nai Zion, which has rented the SCA space in its brownstone on Manhattan’s East Side.

Other sources, including Schonfeld, estimate the debts to be closer to $200,000, including severance pay and “private obligations to individuals” who loaned the foundering organization money, he said.

Because of its financial woes, the organization has not been very active on the interreligious front in the last 18 months or so.

One of its only ongoing projects in recent months is called “The Common Ground for the Common Good.”

The project, funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation, brings together representatives of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other religious bodies. The project works to create a common vocabulary to address moral issues of the day.

It work, promised Winer, that the Synagogue Council’s heirs will continue and expand.