When Israeli Uri Regev was 16 and just beginning his involvement with Progressive Judaism, he came to the United States in 1967 and had a revelation.
He learned that the extreme poles of total secularism and Orthodoxy didn’t exhaust the possible ways of being Jewish, which was the way most Israelis thought of it, he said. As the joke had it, most Israelis felt that “the synagogue I don’t go to has to be Orthodox,” Regev said.
Today, Rabbi Regev is president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a position he has held for more than four years.
And as he explained to an audience of more than 50 at the final luncheon of the Union for Reform Judaism Great Lakes Council’s Regional Biennial Convention, there has been “a mindset change” among Israelis.
Regev cited a survey of Israeli public opinion that the WUPJ commissioned, and whose results it has not made public. This study polled some 1,000 Israelis and spoke to 20 focus groups, he said.
Extrapolating from its findings, the survey suggested that some 1.5 million Jewish Israelis today (out of a total of 5.3 million Jews in a total population of about 7 million) would say, “Reform Judaism is the stream I identify with,” said Regev.
Moreover, some 78 percent support the right of non-Orthodox Jewish religious movements to be on egalitarian footing with Orthodoxy in Israel, he said.
That represents “a tremendous window of opportunity” for Progressive Judaism (as Reform Judaism is known in many countries outside the U.S.) to build and promote an “indigenous” movement that is not “marginal” in Israel, Regev said.
But, asked Regev, has helping this growth “been a priority of our congregations” in the U.S.? To him the answer is no.
Instead, the U.S. Reform community has been “extraordinarily effective” in helping victims of such emergencies as Israel’s recent war or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; but “our lives can’t be built moving from one emergency to another,” Regev said.
“Can we in all honesty carry out and discuss our religious obligations and identity without including our relationship to the land, people and state of Israel?” Regev said.
Moreover, the Reform movement should also be doing more for the benefit of the whole Jewish people, said Regev.
An example is outreach to Jews in the former Soviet Union. Regev said there are now about 70 Progressive synagogues in 11 time zones and some 60 youth groups; and that this past summer 1,100 children participated in 12 camping programs there.
However, in Moscow, the Progressive movement operates in a small and run-down rented facility, compared to a seven-story building run by the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement, said Regev, who had recently visited Moscow.
And he said that while Lubavitch raised some $35.8 million for its work in the FSU last year, the U.S. Reform movement raised only $1.2 million to help the WUPJ’s work there.
“What does that say?” Regev asked.
“The story of the World Union is the story of Reform Judaism’s potentialities,” said Regev. “But it won’t happen by itself.”
And he called on U.S. Reform Jews to “mobilize the community beyond the response to emergencies and crisis” and to share the movement’s “mission and vision” with the whole Jewish world, “to be a source of blessing for all humanity, to keep the way of the Lord, to teach what is just and right.”
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