The “fantastic rate” at which American Jews have taken on the culture of the majority, plus a high rate of intermarriage and a low rate of fertility, pose grave threats to the survival of a Jewish community in this country, two Jewish experts told an unprecedented conference of rabbis and Jewish social workers and educators here.
The warnings were given to 200 members of the Philadelphia Board of Rabbis and the Association of Jewish Agency Executives at the first joint meeting of the two organizations by Dr. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement, and Dr. Marshall Sklare, director of research of the American Jewish Committee. The two groups comprise substantially the whole Philadelphia rabbinate and the corps of Jewish communal service executives.
Dr. Kaplan said that the Jewish people in this country was in danger of “succumbing to the kiss of death,” the modern climate of democracy and naturalism in which American Jews are being integrated. He suggested education, ethical power and reorganization of Jewish life and thought to strengthen the cohesiveness of the Jewish people, and called for efforts to unify Jews and the Jewish religion across the lines of denominational differences. “We Jews must inaugurate an ecumenism of our own,” he said.
Dr. Sklare catalogued specific ways by which American Jewry might disappear, and warned that the rate of acculturation by Jews has proceeded much more rapidly among Jews than among any other group in the United States.. Yiddish, he said, was dropped more rapidly by Jews than any mother tongue by other groups. The high rate of intermarriage, he asserted, was a major threat, and the most that could be hoped for was to contain it at the present level. However, he added, as yet Jews are doing little in this area.
He called “biological suicide” the greatest and least-discussed threat to Jewish survival, adding that almost all American Jews believed in the small family but “nobody talks about it.” “There is a conspiracy of silence,” he maintained, “because we are all engaged in it except a very small segment of the Orthodox community.” He called the synagogue one of the main hopes for Jewish survival, but in a different form than the traditional synagogue.
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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.
