A national Jewish religious leader warned tonight that the American Jewish community was faced with the threat of the possible loss to Judaism of a whole generation because of failure to meet a growing need for adequately trained Jewish spiritual and cultural leaders.
The warning was sounded by Dr. Simon Greenberg, Vice Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Dr.Greenberg delivered the Keynote address at the opening session of the 33rd annual national convention of the National Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs meeting here at the Concord Hotel. More than 1,000 delegates from the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, representing 330 Men’s Clubs with a total membership of 70,000 men, are attending the four day conclave.
Dr. Greenberg told the delegates that “today there are literally hundreds of Jewish communities in the United States that have no trained leadership at all and hundreds more which have woefully inadequate men and women filling the posts of rabbis and teachers.”
Asserting that the American Jewish community has always suffered from a shortage of properly trained spiritual and cultural leaders, Dr. Greenberg said that until the beginning of World War II, this shortage was primarily due to the fact that American Jewry was “still largely an immigrant people. We could not meet the needs of the rapidly growing community for American-trained Jewish cultural and spiritual leaders.” The result, he said, was that “a whole generation” of Jews grew up in the United States, “the majority of whom never so much as knew an American-trained English-speaking rabbi.”
The shortages have been greatly worsened, Dr. Greenberg told the delegates, by the postwar development of many new factors, the chief of which he described as “the profound need felt by an ever-growing number of American-born Jews to find satisfying meaning in their Jewish affiliation.”
Taking issue with observers who have dismissed the tremendous postwar growth in Jewish congregational affiliation as lacking in spiritual depth, Dr. Greenberg asserted that ‘the great upsurge in the creation of congregations and the building of synagogues is much more than mere pediatric or social Judaism. It is the expression of a real need to find purpose and meaning in one’s Jewish identity.” He expressed concern that “if the need for spiritual guidance is not met within a reasonably short time, then the very sense of need will languish and wither.”
Discussing the postwar changes which had brought about the critical shortages of Jewish leadership. Dr. Greenberg said that 10, 000 Jews in the Bronx or Brooklyn might find their spiritual needs taken care of by one congregation but, when they moved to suburbia, “the same 10,000 need 15 or 20 congregations,”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
