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February 28, 2003/Adar1 26 5763, Vol. 55, No. 27
Agency bolsters liberal religious streams
JOE BERKOFSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - The push for Jewish pluralism in Israel took one step forward and one step backward this week.
In the wake of protests by the liberal religious movements, the Jewish Agency for Israel's Board of Governors voted Feb. 25 to restore a total of $305,000 for the Conservative and Reform movements in Israel that the agency's Budget and Finance Committee cut last November.
Yet a day earlier, the newly emerging Likud government coalition - with the secular Shinui Party and National Religious Party among its partners - signaled it would not be making any major changes on such key issues as allowing civil marriages or public transportation on the Sabbath.
Still, Conservative and Reform leaders hailed the Jewish Agency decision to restore to its worldwide $320 million budget for fiscal 2003-2004 about 18 percent of the $4.26 million the liberal streams split in allocations.
At the same time, the Jewish Agency's leadership pledged to help federations in North America, via their United Jewish Communities umbrella system, to raise an additional $197,000 over the next year for the liberal movements' educational and religious activities in Israel.
This goes beyond what the agency's Finance Committee sought last November.
Those budget moves came only after months of protests by North American liberal religious leaders to revive the so-called "affirmative action" funding of their Israeli programs.
For nearly two decades the agency has allocated about $5 million for Israeli religious institutions, with the liberal movements getting 40 percent each and the Orthodox 20 percent.
That formula was designed to make up for the Israeli Orthodox establishment's refusal to aid liberal religious programs there.
Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the move-ment's congregational arm, said the agency move reflects "the realization of the importance the streams play in North America and of pluralism in Israel."
Not everyone greeted the agency decision warmly.
Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for the fervently Orthodox movement's Agudath Israel of America, maintained that support for the liberal streams "weakens us as a people."
"From our perspective, the impact of American-style Jewish religious pluralism in Israel is not, in the end, going to be a healthy thing for the Jewish state," Shafran said.
The American Jewish experience has been marked by intermarriage and assimilation, he said, "and we feel this is due in large part to the lowering in standards that seems to be part and parcel of the Reform and Conservative movements here."
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