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December 22, 2000/Kislev 25, 5761, Vol. 53, No.13
Masorti Jews aim for pluralism
LEISAH NAMM
Staff Writer
From ordaining rabbis to educating Israeli teachers, new immigrants and public school students, the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem is a major force in the Masorti movement, Israeli branch of Conservative Judaism.
Rabbi David Golinkin, president of the institute, visited the Valley Dec. 6 to speak at Har Zion Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Scottsdale.
The Schechter Institute, founded in 1984 with four students, has grown to reach nearly 30,000 people.
"The original purpose was to be a small rabbinical school for the Conservative movement in Israel," Golinkin says. "Over the years we've changed our goals. Our (current) goal is to teach pluralistic, open-minded Judaism to as many Israelis as possible."
One program the institute uses to accomplish this goal is the TALI Education Fund.
TALI, a Hebrew acronym for "increasing Jewish education," supports a network of schools that offer students a comprehensive Jewish studies program. When the first such school was founded by a group of parents 25 years ago, education choices were a secular school with little Jewish education or an Orthodox school, Golinkin says.
The Schechter Institute took over the program in the late 1980s, when there were 16 TALI schools. There are now 64 TALI schools and 42 TALI kindergartens.
Risa Mallin, a member of Beth El Congregation in Phoenix and a donor to the school, has visited two TALI schools with her husband Bruce. Both are involved with the institute's board of governors.
"It really has been such an interesting thing for me ... to see what this money is doing is really going toward principles that American Jews are really influenced by," Mallin says.
The Ina and William Levine Foundation and several individuals in the Valley also have donated money toward the school.
The institute's Graduate School of Advanced Jewish Studies, founded in 1990 with five students - there are now 408 - offers a master's degree in Jewish studies.
The graduate school, which Golinkin defines as "pluralistic," offers specializations he says are not offered elsewhere in Israel, such as women's and gender studies and Judaism and the arts.
"Among the MA students, you have people who grew up in the Conservative movement, you have secular Israelis from kibbutzim and you even have modern Orthodox Jews; and they're all studying, side by side, Judaica on a high academic level."
Most graduate students are experienced teachers who have returned to school to obtain a master's degree in Jewish studies.
"Our goal ... is giving these teachers a lot more Jewish knowledge which they can then bring back to their respective schools because one of the main problems in the Israeli school system, ironically enough, (is that) most Israeli kids know very little about Judaism," Golinkin says.
The only institute program that receives funding from the Israeli government is the decade-old Midreshet Yerushalayim Jewish Studies, an outreach program for Russian immigrants. It serves 700 new immigrants in Israel and 600 students in the former Soviet Union.
Other programs include The Jewish University in Budapest, Hungary, which encompasses a training institute, a community workers' program; a rabbinical and cantorial school; and an Israel Army education series.
The Schechter Institute is affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, both of which require students to spend their third year of rabbinical school at Schechter - the only "institution in the world where you have Conservative rabbinical students from four different seminaries studying together," Golinkin says. The fourth seminary is the Seminario Rabinico in Buenos Aires.
The first Conservative rabbis made aliyah (immigration to Israel) in the 1960s and founded a synagogue in Haifa and another in Ashkelon, Golinkin says. Today, there are almost 50 Conservative synagogues in Israel.
The institute is housed in a former student dormitory for American Conservative rabbinical students spending a year in Israel - a requirement since the formation of the state of Israel, says Rabbi Mark Bisman, spiritual leader of Har Zion.
"This is a mature, independent Israeli institution now that is an exciting development of what was just an overseas project for an American seminary," says Bisman, who was a seminary student.
Golinkin says the Israeli government's reaction to the Masorti movement is "not really a question of conflict, it's a question of a lack of recognition." for instance, Conservative marriages and conversions are not recognized by the Israeli government.
Golinkin was raised in Arlington, Va. and moved to Israel in 1972.
He is a prominent leader of Israel's Masorti movement and has published more than 18 books and 130 articles.
For more information about the Schechter Institute, call 212-870-3178 or visit the Web site at www.schechter.org.il.
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