Luke Ford

Here’s an excerpt from the March 29, 2004 sermon by Rabbi Denise Eger (Reform):

The Panel’s bombshell moment came when Rabbi Paul Menitoff, head of the Reform Rabbis predicted the death of Conservative Judaism. You could hear the gasps in the room and the bristling all around. How can a Reform rabbinical leader, sound the death toll for another denomination? Rabbi Menitoff cited the increasingly strident tones of Jewish communal dialogue by stating, ¬ì those on the right wing of Judaism ¬ñ The orthodox grow more stringent. Our movement the Reform Movement, continues to be defined by its inclusiveness, outreach to interfaith families, gays and lesbians, as an example.¬î

Rabbi Menitoff articulated that Conservative Judaism continues to lose numbers of adherents and is neither milkich or fleishic on many issues of importance today. Within a few decades, "you’ll basically have Orthodox and Reform," he said. "This is in no way an attack, it’s just a reasonable analysis of how things could work out. I hope I’m wrong. I’m just looking at the landscape and providing a perspective." As you can imagine his words were difficult to hear for many of us – and especially so for the members of the Conservative movement, the Conservative Rabbis present in the room.

As Joe Berkofsky, Jewish telegraphic agency writer reported in his article, ‘“Major wedges between the modernist movements will force this exodus,” Menitoff argued, including the Conservative movement’s opposition to intermarriage, its ban on ordaining homosexual rabbis and same-sex marriages and its opposition to patrilineal descent, all of which the Reform movement supports. The Conservative movement may continue to attract those for whom Orthodoxy remains "too restrictive" and Reform "too acculturated," but a more likely outcome will be "the demise of the Conservative movement," Menitoff wrote.’

As Rabbi Dana Kaplan writes in his forthcoming book "The Transformation of American Judaism":

In May 2007, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation quietly launched an inter-denominational fellowship for students from the Hebrew Union College Institute of Religion and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. While the stated goal of the Hevruta Fellowship was to provide the opportunity for eight students a year to work study and lead programs together, it was the first time that students from the two seminaries were involved in a sustained collaborative educational program. Insiders pointed out that this type of collaborative effort could expand and might eventually create a de facto merger between the two movements.

…The non-Orthodox religious movements – Reform, Reconstructionist, and the woefully misnamed Conservative movement – are becoming increasingly similar. They maintain that they have significant theological and ritual differences, but these differences are basically invisible to the average lay person. While they each have their selfish institutional reasons for maintaining their institutional independence, it seems likely that the popular perception of their synagogues is going to blur.

Dana Kaplan goes after Akiva Tatz in chapter three: "But while Tatz could be dismissed as a publicity-seeking baal teshuvah rebbe wannabe…"