Leaders Call for ‘Jews to Marry Other Jews’

The united leadership of Judaism’s Conservative movement has issued its strongest condemnation ever of interfaith marriage, urging Jewish parents and young people to recognize the threat that the growing number of Jews marrying non-Jews poses to the faith’s continued survival.

“We want Jews to marry other Jews,” the 2,000-word policy statement bluntly declares to the centrist movement’s 1.5 million members in the first definitive statement of Conservative doctrine on intermarriage. “Our young people and their families must comprehend the direct relationship between inter-dating and intermarriage.”

However, the statement also recognized that “most parents are neither equipped psychologically nor with the tools of language to give that message with conviction.”

Consequently, the statement said, it is up to Conservative rabbis and synagogue leaders to hammer home the “necessity for endogamy [marriage within the group]” or it “will not be taken seriously anywhere.”

The statement was issued by all five branches of the Conservative movement, Judaism’s middle-of-the-road movement that seeks to maintain traditional Jewish observance while accommodating modernity. It was released Monday at the annual convention of the 1,400-member Rabbinical Assembly, the movement’s Rabbinic umbrella group, meeting in Kiamesha Lake, N.Y.

In addition to the Rabbinical Assembly, the movement’s other branches are the Jewish Theological Seminary, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the Women’s League of Conservative Judaism and the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs.

“The Conservative movement has assumed in the past that the best way to deal with intermarriage was for rabbis to deal with it on a case-by-case basis,” said Rabbi Alan Silverstein, president of the 1,400-member Rabbinical Assembly.

“We now have decided that we need to state the case directly to the laity because the extent of the challenge has become so enormous.”

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The Conservative statement is the latest sign of the increasing concern over intermarriage among American Jewish leaders.

The 1990 National Jewish Population Study found that 52% of all American Jews are today marrying non-Jews. Other surveys have shown that only about a quarter of the children born to such interfaith couples are being raised as Jews and that 90% of these children are marrying non-Jews.

Silverstein said that the intermarriage rate among “committed” Conservative Jews is only about 25%, or about half the rate for all Jews. In some parts of the country, the intermarriage rate among Reform and unaffiliated Jews--Jews who do not belong to any synagogue--is more than 75%.

Jewish leaders fear that the inevitable product of this ever-increasing rate of intermarriage will be a gradual watering down of Jewish religious observance that will end with many of the nation’s 5.6 million Jews assimilating into the general population and abandoning the faith.

Even the Reform movement--the most liberal of Judaism’s three major ideologies--has begun to rethink its historic openness to intermarriage and has urged its rabbis to reconsider their willingness to perform interfaith weddings.

However, the concern of Jewish leaders--Conservative, Reform or otherwise--has not been matched by the majority of ordinary American Jews, who have shown they are willing to accept intermarriage as the price for living in an open society.

A 1990 study by the Jewish Outreach Institute in New York found that 70% of the Conservative lay members it surveyed wanted the movement’s rabbis to perform interfaith marriages if there was a commitment to raise the children as Jews. The figure was 90% for Reform Jews, who together with Conservative Jews account for more than 75% of all Jews who belong to synagogues.

Moreover, 70% of the Conservative laity also said they would regard their grandchildren as Jewish even if the mother did not convert to Judaism--a position that flies in the face of Conservative doctrine. Unlike Reform Jews, who consider the children of a Jewish father to also be Jews, the Conservative movement follows traditional Jewish law, which counts only the children of a Jewish mother as Jews.

Egon Mayer, who directs the Jewish Outreach Center, said those findings “show just how wide a gulf exists between Conservative leaders and the rank-and-file congregation member.”

In fact, the new Conservative statement declares that those who marry outside the faith should not be rejected.

The “first line of defense” against intermarriage is repeated articulation of the importance of “in marriage.” But failing that, said the statement, the Conservative movement should encourage the non-Jewish spouse’s conversion to Judaism.