Synagogue Council Looks to Be on Verge of Collapse : Judaism: The faith’s only interdenominational body is beset by budget deficits and differences among Conservative, Orthodox and Reform factions.

The Synagogue Council of America, Judaism’s sole interdenominational body, has apparently collapsed under the weight of financial shortfalls and internal differences after nearly 70 years of operation.

Although there has been no formal vote to disband the Synagogue Council, it is vacating its Manhattan offices this month. A plan to move the council’s administrative headquarters temporarily to a Reform temple in White Plains, N.Y., was vetoed by Orthodox representatives.

“There don’t seem to be enough people who are really interested in maintaining the organization,” said Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, an Orthodox rabbi in Manhattan who has been the council’s president for the last year.

“It doesn’t have a natural constituency of lay people. Those of us who are volunteer leaders have tried very hard, but we can’t keep afloat something that isn’t sustained by the community,” he said.

The council owes $200,000 in rent, catering bills and loans made by some of its constituent organizations, according to Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of United Synagogue, the Conservative movement’s congregational arm and one of six denominational agencies whose representatives comprise the council.

Since its founding in 1926, the Synagogue Council has been the only Jewish religious group in the nation in which the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements were represented. Members of those movements cooperate in other Jewish agencies, but those groups are secular in nature, not religious.

The council has had ongoing relationships with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Churches, the umbrella body for 32 Protestant and Orthodox Christian denominations, and was one of the partners in the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, which represents world Jewry in dealings with the Vatican.

Rabbi Mordechai Waxman, a past Synagogue Council president, said interfaith talks, particularly with the Vatican, could be slowed while attempts to form a new organization to take over for the council remain unsettled.

The new, as yet unnamed group, will likely not include Orthodox organizations, although individual Orthodox rabbis may be included.

One of the most controversial elements of the Synagogue Council’s procedures--and some say, the element that paralyzed it--was the right of any one of its constituent groups to veto any proposal. Theological discussions were often stymied by hesitancy among Orthodox Jews to engage in such talks with non-Jews, and even with non-Orthodox Jews.

Non-Orthodox council members blamed the organization’s demise on the Orthodox, and noted that even without Orthodox participation, the organization that replaces the council would still represent more than 80 percent of the organized American Jewish community.

Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, executive vice president of the Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havurot, said “the Synagogue Council was an artificial organization because the Orthodox maintained a stranglehold over it, not allowing any substantive discussion and preventing any real interfaith dialogue.”

But Rabbi Lookstein denied that the Orthodox caused the agency’s collapse. He said interest waned on the part of all participants.