World Conference of Liberal Jews Discusses Obstacles in Israel

A six-day international conference of the World Union for Progressive Judaism opened here last night with an appeal to the Soviet Union to end its restrictions against Russian Jews and announcement of plans for a legal battle in Israel to enable Liberal rabbis and congregations to perform such ministerial functions as marriages and funerals.

Rabbi Jacob K. Shankman of New Rochelle, N.Y., president, urged the 500 delegates to act to make direct representation to the Soviet Union about the World Union’s “deep concern” for the plight of Russian Jews.” He also called on the organization to seek to “arouse the conscience of mankind and the sensitive moral spirit of the world to this threat of Jewish extinction.” He declared that to remain silent on the issue “is to commit a grave moral sin.”

He reported that the organization’s seven Israeli congregations and four rabbis were prepared to take legal steps to obtain full rights to perform their ministerial tasks. He said that the Liberal laymen and rabbis in Israel had formed a National Progressive Religious Council and had won some support in the Israel press and from Members of Parliament. They “are ready now to demand, and become embattled for, recognition as rabbis by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate,” he said.

Liberal Israeli groups, he told the convention “have stood up heroically and unflinchingly against petty annoyances, political obstructionism, irritating and costly litigation and even official religious opposition and hostility.” The seven congregations conduct regular religious services, hold religious school classes for children and adults, conduct extensive youth activities, lecture on Liberal Judaism at schools and collectives and have published their own prayer book, mahzor and haggadah, he said.

He indicated that the world organization planned to advise the Liberal rabbis in Israel “to work patiently and creatively to build their congregations and teach their children, and through the spoken and written word ever widen the understanding and meaning of progressive Judaism. We shall support and encourage their efforts on the firing line,” he declared.