Non-Orthodox Jews, including Reform Jews, will still be around in significant numbers in 200 years, but as each year goes past, Orthodox Judaism plays a bigger role in Jewish life. This has been a steady trend from the 1960s and there is no reason to expect it to stop. Orthodox Judaism is the only form of Jewish organization shown to perpetuate itself.
During government hearing on non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall, Yariv Levin slams the U.S. largest Jewish movement, saying prayer space unnecessary since Reform Jews will be all but gone in three generations.
Tourism Minister Yariv Levin sharply attacked the American Jewish Reform movement during Sunday’s government hearing on the compromise regarding a non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall, saying that Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to her Jewish partner, officiated by a Reform rabbi and a priest, shows the extent of assimilation among Reform Jews in the United States.
“The Reform Jews in the U.S. are a waning world,” Levin said during the meeting, targeting the largest religious movement among U.S. Jews, estimated at over a million and a half people. “The assimilation there is of enormous extent. They don’t even properly track [the assimilation] inside their communities. The evidence is that a man who calls himself a reform rabbi is standing there with a priest and weds Hillary Clinton’s daughter, and no one condemns it, thereby legitimizing it.”
Levin said that with this reality among members of the Reform movement in the United States, the controversy over non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall will become irrelevant within two or three generations because, he claimed, all of the Reform Jews will have assimilated.
Ultimately, however, Levin supported the compromise plan for the non-Orthodox prayer plaza at the Western Wall, explaining that he was concerned that the High Court of Justice would issue a ruling on the matter that would provide even more favorable terms to the Reform movement, and therefore he saw the plan as the better of two bad alternatives.
