Judaism, Reform (North America)
The Reform movement in Judaism is one of the four major movements in North American Judaism (Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist). It is also called liberal Judaism or progressive Judaism, but the American Reform movement constitutes the largest national movement of liberal Judaism.
Although having its roots in Germany, it was in America where the idea of Jewish Reform fully developed and prospered. According to its doctrine, progressive Judaism has to adapt to the challenges posed to it by place and time; therefore its manifestations vary according to their settings and undergo continuous change.Ideologically, the movement has its roots in the attempt to adapt Judaism to the challenges of modernity and modern statehood during the eighteenth century; especially important to its development was the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, first introduced by Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin. Mendelssohn and other Maskilim (Jewish Enlightenment thinkers) formed a new Jewish elite that sought access to a new sociability outside the traditional Jewish community. Yet it was only in the nineteenth century that a Jewish laity started to express the desire to adapt the exercise of Jewish religiosity by introducing aesthetic changes in services, liturgy, and prayers— thereby adjusting to the outside style of mainstream religiosity in order to enhance Jews’ civic respectability. Israel Jacobson was the first to introduce visible changes in the synagogue in 1810. His changes were officially adopted by the Hamburg Temple, which opened in 1818 and introduced its own prayer book in 1819.
However, the movement was not solely based on aesthetic changes, but rather on ideological definitions of Judaism. The ideological concepts grew out of rabbinical and scholarly interpretations that gave the movement philosophical and religious depth and strength to survive and develop.
During the 1840s, Abraham Geiger, Samuel Holdheim, and Samuel Hirsch were the main champions of an intellectual debate on the transformation of Judaism. It was a debate that played itself out quite publicly in the rising periodical and newspaper culture and other printed works, as well as at three rabbinical conferences between 1844 and 1846 where Jewish religious authorities and a younger generation of university-trained rabbis sought common ground.The reformers used German instead of Hebrew during services and sought to open up the communal ties of traditional Judaism and its particularism and explore and strengthen Jewish universalism, finding a place for Jews as citizens in the public sphere. This happened mainly by defining Judaism as a religion, denying the idea of Jewish nationality, and reinterpreting Israel’s special mission as a universalistic task of bringing ethical monotheism to the human family. The movement was not able to fully develop in Germany because of the legally enforced communal unity and religious and secular authority. Therefore, the United States became the land of promise for the Reform movement.
Between 1840 and 1870 a first large wave of Jewish immigrants from Germanspeaking countries (140,000) arrived on American shores. They dramatically changed the ethnic composition, overall number, and religious ritual of the roughly 3,000 Jews of Sephardic and Ashkenazic background who had been in the United States prior to 1830. Very different in ethnic background and used to a different religious ritual, the German Jews founded their own congregations and started to introduce reforms to traditional Jewish orthodoxy in America. This was strongly facilitated by the traditions of American denominationalism, voluntarism, religious liberty, and the strict separation of church and state, as well as by the complete lack of any established religious authority in American Judaism.
The first Reform congregation, the Har Sinai Verein (Har Sinai Association), was established in Baltimore in 1842 by a group of German Jewish laymen and modeled after the Hamburg Temple.
Due to the lack of a rabbi, they held lay-led services. The upheavals in central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century destroyed the hopes for major reforms in Judaism in Europe and full emancipation for German Jews. Several rabbis, therefore, joined the wave of German Jewish immigration to the United States. One of the first Reform rabbis who immigrated to the United States was Max Lilienthal. He succeeded Leo Merzbacher as rabbi of the German congregation Anshe Chesed in New York City. Leo Merzbacher became the rabbi of the newly founded Kultusverein in New York in 1845, also modeled after the Hamburg Temple and named Temple Emanu-El in 1846. The most important champions of Reform Judaism in the German immigrant rabbinate were David Einhorn, Bernhard Felsenthal, Samuel Adler, Samuel Hirsch, Kaufmann Kohler, and Isaac Mayer Wise. They soon sensed the opportunities America offered Jews and Judaism; however, they imagined varying concepts for the future of American Reform between radical and moderate paths.Wise, the organizer and “founder” of American Reform Judaism, sought to establish a national religious platform (“synod”) for American Judaism. For national unity he was willing to sacrifice religious principle and would compromise with orthodoxy. He first organized a synod in 1847 in New York City, which was opposed by a group of Jewish freethinkers,
In 1875 the Hebrew Union College (HUC) was founded in Cincinnati and began training American rabbinical students. The first HUC building (shown here) stood from 1881 to 1912. (Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Campus, Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion)
the Lichtfreunde. In cooperation with the orthodox Isaac Leeser, Wise again organized a rabbinical meeting in Cleveland, the Cleveland Conference, in 1855. Again urged to secure the formation of an English-speaking American rabbinate through the establishment of a rabbinical seminary in America, he tried to reach a religious consensus on an American Judaism.
His efforts, however, were thwarted by the more radical Einhorn who rejected any theological compromise.This friction was theologically confirmed in 1869 at the Philadelphia Conference, which was dominated by radical German Reform rabbis, such as Einhorn, Hirsch, Felix Adler, and Felsenthal. At the conference Wise was isolated and had to give up his idea of defining a national religious platform and union (“synod”) in American Judaism. However, in 1873 the congregations of the West and South launched the formation of a national lay union of Jewish congregations in the United States, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), in Cincinnati, Ohio. The newly founded union was to cooperate in Jewish education, social services, and the establishment of a rabbinical college, but left room for congregational religious independence. In 1875 the Hebrew Union College (HUC) was founded in Cincinnati and began training American rabbinical students. The college institutionalized a modern academic training for rabbis, including elements of critical theology and secular Wissenschafi: (science). This had always been demanded by the German Reform movement, but the latter was not able to integrate Jewish Wissenschafi into the German university curriculum. Wise served as president of the college from its inception to his death in 1900. The UAHC grew to a national organization that integrated the large majority of American Jewish congregations until the Reform movement made a decisive ideological statement in favor of progressive Judaism.
The Pittsburgh Platform, the outcome of a rabbinical conference and meeting of the Reform rabbinate in Pittsburgh in 1885, established a new credo in American Reform Judaism that dominated the era of “Classical Reform” and was designed by the two sons-in-law of Einhorn, the radical Reform rabbis Kaufmann Kohler and Emil Hirsch. It rejected the idea of a Jewish nationality, fostered Jewish universalism, and encouraged Jews to show this practically through strong engagement in the social service movement.
However, with this new platform as the basis of the UAHC, more conservative congregations chose to leave the movement and founded their own college, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City (1887), and a new movement, the Conservative movement in Judaism.Now under the intellectual guidance of Kaufmann Kohler and Emil Hirsch, Classical Reform developed its own rabbinical organization in 1889: the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), over which Wise presided until his death in 1900. Kaufmann Kohler succeeded Wise as president of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He strongly influenced its curricula and faculty until his retirement in 1921. His brother-in-law, Emil G. Hirsch, rabbi of Sinai Congregation in Chicago and professor of theology at the University of Chicago, decisively shaped the American Reform movement theologically and practically through his strong engagement in the American Social Gospel movement.
During the 1920s, the American Reform movement slowly started discussing Zionism, after an increasing number of individuals and the prominent rabbi Steven Wise had raised the issue and Wise with his People’s Synagogue and Jewish Institute of Religion had started supporting the movement publicly. In 1937 the movement officially changed its position on Zionism and introduced a new approach toward “tradition” and Jewish ethnic belonging by the adoption of the so-called Columbus Platform.
During the Holocaust, the Reform movement sought to rescue several of the most gifted German intellectuals and students from the Hochschule fur die Wis- senschaft des Judentums (University for the Science of Judaism) in Berlin by establishing a “University in Exile.” The effort saved the lives of Abraham Joshua Heschel, Eugen Taubler, Franz Rosenthal, Isaiah Sonne, Franz Landsberger, Alexander Guttmann, and Samuel Atlas. Some of them, like Joachim Prinz and Abraham Joshua Heschel, and other scholars and rabbis felt that their experiences with racism and Nazism in Germany gave them a special obligation to increase their political engagement in America, especially in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s.
After the Holocaust, the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) emerged as the only surviving rabbinical college for the Reform movement and took on a central function for the training of Reform rabbis worldwide. After having established a campus in New York City (1950) and Los Angeles (1954), the college also founded a fourth campus in Jerusalem (1963). The Cincinnati campus includes the American Jewish Archives and the Klau Library. In 1972 the HUC-JIR in Cincinnati, Ohio, ordained the first female rabbi, Sally Priesand, and thus adapted to new challenges that were posed to modern Judaism in America.
Cornelia Wilhelm
See also Chicago; Cincinnati; Einhorn, David; German Jewish Migration to the United States; Kohler, Kaufmann; Leeser, Isaac; New York City; Wise, Isaac Mayer
References and Further Reading
Breslauer, Daniel S. Covenant and Community in Modern Judaism. New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Meyer, Michael A. Hebrew Union College— Jewish Institute of Religion, A Centennial History 1875-1975. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College, 1976.
------. Response to Modernity, A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1990.
Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry. New York: Oxford University, 1987.