Conservative Judaism on Decline

From Associated Press:

The branch of American Judaism that occupies the middle ground between those who buck tradition and those who fully embrace it have been confronting the dwindling appeal of their movement in a meeting this week in Houston.

Members of the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, at their annual convention, say their seminaries and day schools have been educating more and more Jews, only to see them flee to other Jewish movements.

Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the leading Conservative school, said the exodus of young Conservative Jews with strong religious educations is a key reason the movement is floundering. "I deem that to be the most critical loss," he said, in a phone interview from the meeting, titled "Reinventing Conservative Judaism."

Schorsch partly blames the trend on the poor quality of worship in Conservative synagogues, which he says are so geared toward "entry-level Jews" that those with more religious knowledge leave for the stricter Orthodox congregations. Schorsch says he often worships at an Orthodox synagogue on Friday nights, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, because of the beauty of the service...

To the many Conservative rabbis who believe that they are being very lenient in halakhic matters to keep Jews from drifting even farther away from tradition, the move of more observant Jews to Orthodoxy is somewhat a bittersweet success. The Conservative movement has succeeded with those Jews, and the greatest success is to see them move into a community that does not adopt many of the "leniencies" deemed necessary in this time of emergency. This is similar to Orthodox rabbis in small, out-of-town communities who find that their congregants who grow the most in religiosity tend to move to neighborhoods or cities with larger Orthodox populations. Their greatest successes are those who move away. This is very difficult for a rabbi, but most are able to come to terms with this bittersweet definition of success.

So I congratulate the Conservative movement on "graduating" many Jews into Orthodoxy.