Rabbi Recalls Taking on Tough Issues : Judaism: As Alexander Schindler prepares to retire after 23 years, he says he tried to reach out and welcome all through Reform’s synagogue doors.

The view from Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler’s office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is expansive. Nine floors below, Central Park, awash in fall colors on a bright afternoon, stretches westward to provide a sense of openness found nowhere else in this city of looming stone and glass towers.

It’s an appropriate perch for Schindler, the retiring president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the synagogue arm of Reform Judaism. In his 23 years at the helm, Schindler’s approach toward Jewish life has been equally expansive as he sought to meet the challenges of a secular age by throwing open Reform’s synagogue doors to anyone who might enter.

“My conviction is that Judaism cannot today be an exclusive club, but must be a faith for all those who wish to join,” said Schindler, 70, whose eloquence and willingness to tackle the tough issues has earned him a preeminence in contemporary American Jewish life few can match.

Schindler’s contract does not expire until June. But this is the year of his organization’s biennial convention, and the meeting set for next week in Atlanta has been designated Schindler’s formal farewell. After that, Schindler will go on sabbatical, and his successor, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, 48, will take over.

Schindler will be a tough act to follow.

“Alex more than anybody has embodied Reform Judaism,” said Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, who leads Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and formerly directed the reform group’s interfaith activities. “He has been our spiritual leader. His ability to sense whatever was percolating in the movement was extraordinary. He will be missed.”

It was Schindler who spearheaded Reform’s outreach to the growing number of Jews married to non-Jews and the movement’s acceptance of patrilineal descent--a change that contradicted 2,000 years of Jewish insistence that only the offspring of a Jewish mother was automatically Jewish.

Those positions earned Schindler the scorn of more traditional Jewish leaders, who castigated him for pandering to his group’s membership needs at the expense of long-cherished traditions that bound Jews together as a people.

Schindler dismissed the criticism as irrelevant to the everyday needs of most American Jews, who surveys have shown care more about whether their children are happily married than who they marry.

“These disputes are only between leaders,” he said. “On a de facto basis, American Jews have accepted intermarriage and call their grandchildren Jewish no matter what someone else says.”

Atlanta will be the last hurrah for Reform’s grand old man, an energetic leader who seems always on the go, visiting Reform congregations across the United States and representing American Judaism at interreligious events around the world.

But it also marks a turning point for Reform Judaism, a movement born in 19th Century Germany among Jews newly freed from ghetto life and eager to shed orthodoxy’s constraints for the era’s emerging liberalism. Today, Reform Judaism claims the allegiance of about 1.4 million American Jews--more than 40% of those Jews who participate in synagogue life.

Schindler put outreach first--to the intermarried, to gays and lesbians, to any non-Jew in search of a spiritual home. Close behind were his commitments to liberal social activism and religious equality for women. But in the soul-searching ‘90s, Schindler and other Reform leaders are now emphasizing meaning over membership.

“Outreach was never designed to contain intermarriage, but to keep the intermarried and their offspring within the community,” Schindler said. The next step, he said, is to educate those who have retained Jewish ties about Judaism and religious life. “We need to offer more. We need to satisfy the heart.”

Two signs of the movement’s new direction are the use of more Hebrew in worship services and the resurgence of some traditional Jewish rituals and practices that the ultra-rational Reform movement of the past rejected.

Another sign is the attempt to hold congregants to tighter religious standards--a sharp departure from Reform’s past insistence on individual and congregational autonomy on the finer points of Jewish theology and practice.

Guidelines--the Union of American Hebrew Congregations does not issue edicts--that limited the role of non-Jewish spouses in synagogue leadership were introduced, and last year, the group rejected the membership bid of a “humanistic” Cincinnati congregation that unabashedly rejected belief in God.

In Atlanta, the UAHC will debate a non-binding resolution that could prevent children who receive “formal religious education in any other religion” from also attending Reform religious schools.

That’s a big step for a movement whose members marry non-Jews at a rate of more than 60%. Although no one knows how many children from interfaith homes are raised in Judaism and another faith simultaneously, the resolution could potentially affect a significant number of Reform families.

Dru Greenwood, the group’s outreach director, said that in some Reform religious schools as many as 70% of the children in the lower grades come from interfaith families.

“We once assumed that enrollment [in a Jewish school] meant the couple wanted to raise their child as a Jew,” she said. “Now we think that assumption might be erroneous.”

Schindler supports passage of the measure.

“This in no way lessens our commitment to outreach,” he said. “But it’s totally confusing for a child to be raised in two faiths. This underscores that, contrary to what our detractors say, we are not about watering down Judaism and dividing the community.”

Schindler allowed that his outreach to the intermarried and their offspring was a rear-guard action--albeit one he regarded as the only practical response to the general Jewish community’s unwillingness to sanction those who marry non-Jews, as was historically the case.

“One point I will concede,” said Schindler, who has seen one of his own five children marry a non-Jew, “is that by drawing them in we lend some legitimacy to intermarriage. But what’s the alternative?

“To shut them out? That’s too great a risk. We may then lose them and the generations that come from them for all time.”