Rabbi Reuven Bar Ephraim of Switzerland said it’s sometimes a challenge for him to defend Israel when his own Reform movement is not recognized by Israel’s Orthodox-dominated Chief Rabbinate.
“On one level, we fight the Israeli government as if there were no other issues, and we support Israel as if there were no Reform Judaism,” said the Zurich rabbi. “The fact that the Israeli government doesn’t recognize non-Orthodox Judaism is the same as its non-recognition of the rights of non-Jews, or gays and lesbians, or women. It’s a problem.”
Bar Ephraim’s unease is shared by many Reform Jews, who try to balance defending Israel with a desire to criticize the country’s treatment of religious and ethnic minorities.
But the picture of the Reform movement in Israel under siege isn’t really accurate anymore, many Reform leaders say.
For one thing, Israel does recognize Reform Judaism in some respects, and in recent years there has been progress in funding, allocating land and education, according to Rabbi Uri Regev, a Reform leader and president of Hiddush, which advocates for religious rights in Israel.
Over the past few years the Israeli Movement for Progressive Judaism has opened nine new synagogues, bringing the number of Reform shuls in the Jewish state to 34.
All have rabbis, and the movement’s rabbinical seminary in Jerusalem is filled with Israeli-born students. Israel’s Reform summer camps are growing in number, as is the country’s Reform youth movement.
“Too much of the American Jewish establishment likes to keep alive the image of Israel as victim, which expands into other areas as well,” said Rabbi Robert Orkand, president of the Association of Reform Zionists of America.
Orkand noted, however, that “with the maturing of the Israeli Progressive movement and its great success, that strategy no longer works, nor is it necessary. But that message has not filtered down to individual rabbis and congregations.”
To be sure, the lack of recognition of non-Orthodox weddings and conversions remains a sore point. But as the world’s Reform leaders talk about Israel, they are trying to change what many say is a badly outdated perception of Israeli Reform as a small, beleaguered movement.
Just as the Israel-Diaspora relationship generally has shifted to more of a partnership than a paternalistic relationship over the past decade or so, so too should the relationship between Israeli and American Reform Jews, say these Reform leaders.
“The movement impacts the lives of thousands of Israelis every day,” Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner of Alyth Gardens, a large Reform congregation in London, told JTA at the biennial conference of the World Union for Progressive Judaism biennial held earlier in February in San Francisco. “It is growing and is recognized.”
Pretending that it is not “is a defeatist argument,” she added.
“For too long,” Orkand said, “the Reform Zionist movement was fighting battles to allow our movement in Israel to grow and thrive, and too often the result was to suggest to our people here that Israel is filled with people who hate us.”
It is primarily American Reform rabbis who keep alive that old image, Reform leaders say. Most Reform leaders outside the United States have shifted their tone over the past two years or so, stressing the gains of the Israeli Reform movement.
The Americans need to catch up, said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the movement’s U.S. branch. “It’s happening, but we do need to remind people,” he said.
Loading ...