Lay Leaders Back Rabbis in Stance on Mixed Marriages

Amid growing pressure on rabbis to marry Jews to non-Jews, Reform Judaism’s lay leaders have voted overwhelmingly against urging their rabbis to drop their official opposition to interfaith marriage ceremonies.

The Union of American Hebrew Congregations’ national board of trustees took up the hot-button issue for the first time ever at its three-day Los Angeles meeting, which ended Sunday, but decided that the rabbis’ right of conscience and authority on religious matters must be respected.

“We should be able to trust our rabbis,” said board member Mark Levy, a past president of Leo Baeck Temple in Bel-Air.

Many rabbis had cautioned that even suggesting policy changes would tip the delicate balance of power between lay and rabbinical leadership. “Disaster awaits,”’ warned Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, president of Hebrew Union College, which trains Reform rabbis.

Only 15 to 20 trustees raised their hands in favor of the resolution proposed by attorney David Belin of Des Moines, Iowa, to some 170 trustees in voting late Saturday night at the Century Plaza Hotel. “I’m very disappointed, but I was able to raise the question of ‘Who is religion for, the people or the rabbis?’ ” Belin said.

The liberal Reform wing of Judaism, which has 860 temples and more than 1.3 million members in North America, is roughly comparable in size to centrist Conservative Judaism. Various Orthodox organizations make up the smaller, traditionalist segment of American Judaism.

A 1990 survey said that 62% of Reform Jews who married in the late 1980s had wed non-Jewish partners, a trend that Reform leaders said threatens to decimate the American Jewish population.

About 40% of Reform rabbis perform interfaith weddings. Their official organization, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, is on record against mixed-faith weddings, but acknowledges the right of a rabbi to follow his or her own conscience.

Parents in many Reform temples contend that if their rabbi turns down the request of their sons and daughters to conduct a wedding, the effect on the Jewish partner and his or her family may be devastating.

Pressure on rabbis to officiate at interfaith weddings is especially strong because of that wing’s adoption of other changes, such as the ordination of women rabbis and cantors, and not requiring kosher diets. Critics also say the official policy is hypocritical because Reform Judaism has a growing program to welcome married couples of mixed faith to synagogue life.

In June, the Central Conference’s executive committee reaffirmed the official opposition to mixed marriages.

“Given the fact that the CCAR had just revisited this issue in June, we were obligated to respect the integrity of the rabbis regardless of our own personal opinions,” said trustee Rebecca Zlotoff of Santa Monica.

Two Southern California rabbis explained their opposing stances on mixed-faith marriages during a trustees session Saturday morning at the Skirball Cultural Center and Museum in the Sepulveda Pass.

After declining at first to officiate at interfaith weddings at Congregation Emanu El in San Bernardino, Rabbi Hillel Cohn said he has done so now for 25 years. “The Jewish partners of those mixed marriages have in the great majority not only maintained their ties with the Jewish people but also have strengthened those bonds--expressed in the creation of homes where children are being raised as proud and participating Jews,” Cohn said.

However, Rabbi Carole L. Meyers of Glendale said that she refuses because interfaith weddings, in her view, “diminish the power and integrity of the ritual [and] will be perfunctory rather than expressing holiness.”

Such weddings at times are held “to keep someone else happy” besides the couple and “there is a high probability of some coercion of the non-Jewish partner,” she said.

The issue--recently termed by a Reform journal as one dominating relations today between rabbis and congregations--”is a rabbi’s nightmare,” said Meyers, who has been at Temple Sinai in Glendale for 10 years.

Meyers was the first full-time woman rabbi hired by a congregation in Southern California, but she said she was previously turned down by one synagogue that didn’t want a female rabbi and by another that didn’t like her stance against interfaith weddings.

After the trustees declined on Saturday night to press for policy changes by the rabbinical organization, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said he hoped the vote would send a message to congregations.

“Whether a rabbi will officiate at an interfaith wedding should not be the focus of a congregation’s evaluation of its rabbi,” Yoffie said. Rather, he said, the questions should be whether the rabbi will create a warm congregation and strengthen the Jewish identity of its children.

“The rabbi’s influence is much more lasting in these areas than in the few moments of the wedding ceremony,” he said.