Conservative Judaism Agrees to Accept Women Rabbis

A potentially embarrassing situation within Conservative Judaism was avoided this week when the Rabbinical Assembly voted to change its constitution to admit automatically into its membership any Jewish Theological Seminary graduate--including women.

The breakthrough for Jewish women who want to become rabbis in the Conservative branch of Judaism occurred in October, 1983, when its Jewish Theological Seminary faculty voted to train and ordain qualified women graduates.

The association of Conservative rabbis had failed narrowly in the last two years to muster a three-fourths majority to accept a woman rabbi--thus female seminary graduates could not join their male colleagues in the Rabbinical Assembly.

The results of the mail vote announced Wednesday was 636, or 70%, for the change and 267 against--meeting the two-thirds majority requirement for a constitutional change.

The New York City seminary on Thursday announced that Amy Eilberg, 30, of Bloomington, Ind., will become the first Conservative woman rabbi when she graduates in May.

Eilberg and 18 more women currently enrolled will join the more than 80 women rabbis already ordained in the Reform branch and the small Reconstructionist movement, leaving only Orthodox Judaism opposed to the change, on the ground that it violates Jewish law.

Although Eilberg and her future rabbinical colleagues might have found jobs in synagogues or with Jewish agencies without the help or approval of the Rabbinical Assembly, the latter organization acts as a placement agency and provides full recognition for Conservative rabbis.

“The vote demonstrates that we accept the notion that all human beings are created in the image of God and have an equal right to preach and teach the word of God,” said Rabbi Alexander M. Shapiro, president of the rabbinical group.

However, Rabbi David Novak, head of the Union of Traditional Conservative Judaism, which opposed the move, vowed to fight to overturn the vote and said that no member of his group would “accept marriages, divorces or conversion where a women rabbi officiates.” The result, he said, would be “further divisions within the world Jewish community.”

Eilberg sidestepped the dispute. She said she had wanted to be a rabbi since 1973 and was not willing to turn to the Reform or Reconstructionist movement for ordination--even if her stand meant a long delay in acceptance of women rabbis by Conservative Judaism.

She said she is “very proud” to be the first. Her husband, a professor, was “very excited” by the news, she said.

“As of today, Jewish women need never again feel that their gender is a barrier to their full participation in Jewish life,” she said.

The Philadelphia-born seminarian is the daughter of former U.S. Rep. Joshua Eilberg, a Philadelphia Democrat who pleaded guilty in 1979 to accepting $20,000 in favors in connection with a grant he helped obtain for a Philadelphia hospital and was fined $10,000 and placed on probation.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell says that he is not interested in political office, despite his eagerness to engage in public debates and point to popularity polls.

He squared off with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) in a quasi-debate last week in Washington and in the same city last Tuesday debated Judy Goldsmith, president of the National Organization for Women.

Next stop: the Oxford Union Debating Society in England on March 1 when the fundamentalist will face, in a more formal forensic fray, the prime minister of New Zealand, David Lange. The prime minister has disturbed the Reagan Administration by denying port access to ships that may carry nuclear arms.

The motion that Lange will support and Falwell will oppose is, “That the Western nuclear alliance is morally indefensible.”

Falwell’s publicity frequently notes that the Moral Majority president was the second most-admired man in the 1984 Good Housekeeping magazine poll and was named one of the 25 most influential Americans by U.S. News and World Report. However, the annual Gallup Poll’s “most admired” list does not include Falwell in the top 10, although three ordained men--Pope John Paul II, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Billy Graham--follow President Reagan, who was No. 1.

Asked in an interview if he would like to seek public office, Falwell said, “I have no interest in that direction at all.” He said he plans to pastor his Virginia church, preach the gospel and speak to the issues for the rest of his life.

Falwell said that voters would reject a liberal or a conservative clergyman running for high political office. “On either side, at the wire, I think there would be a repudiation,” he said.

The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles will meet today to elect a suffragan, or assistant, bishop. The special voting at St. John’s Church in Los Angeles will be the first since the Rt. Rev. Robert C. Rusack, was chosen as a suffragan bishop in 1964 and diocesan bishop in 1974.

Although added candidates may be nominated from the floor, the four nominees are: The Rev. Canon Oliver B. Garver Jr., longtime executive assistant to Rusack; the Very Rev. Harvey H. Guthrie, since 1969 the dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass.; the Rev. Canon Gethin B. Hughes, Welsh-born rector of All Saints-by-the-Sea Church, Santa Barbara, and the Venerable Lorentho Wooden, a black archdeacon in the Cincinnati-based Diocese of Southern Ohio.