by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement)
After his death in 1915, Solomon Schechter’s legacy of Zionism continued through key members of the Jewish Theological Seminary faculty and through the stream of rabbinical school graduates. Conservative Movement historian Rabbi Simcha Kling noted: “Conservative Judaism was unique among the contemporary interpretations of the Jewish tradition in that it had always insisted that religion and nationalism were integrated components of a totality.”
Professor Louis Ginzberg affirmed this position: “Jewish nationalism without religion would be a tree without fruit. Jewish religion without Jewish nationalism would be a tree without roots.” Ginzberg, accompanied by JTS Professor Israel Friedlaender, had been a delegate to the controversial Sixth Zionist Congress during which the Uganda debate took place. Both voted “no” on the “Uganda as a Jewish home” question, in contrast to JTS lay leader Harry Friedenwald, who voted “yes.”
In 1919, while serving as acting president of the nascent United Synagogue of America, Ginzberg lobbied for the fledgling Conservative movement to become much more active in Zionist endeavors. “I believe that the time has come when the United Synagogue should take an active part in the work for the restoration of Palestine,” he said. “Most of the members of United Synagogue, congregations as well as individuals, are enthusiastically engaged in this kind of work. It is high time that the voice of our organization be heard in a matter so deeply affecting the spiritual life of the Jew.”
Until his tragic death in 1919 — on a “mission” to assist the Jews of Ukraine —Israel Friedlaender remained the most active Zionist within the faculty.
Friedlaender’s collection of essays, titled “Past and Present” (1919), as well as his translation of many of the writings of Ahad Ha’Am, testify to his devotion to the cause. Simcha Kling pointed out that “Friedlaender saw the renewed Jewish community in the homeland as far more than a place of refuge [for persecuted Jews] and even more than the locus of Jewish creativity. He recognized it as the connecting bond between all Jewries, the force preserving the unity of the Jewish people.” Like his mentor Ahad Ha’Am, “he saw a center in Zion radiating new life to all parts of the Jewish body.” In Friedlaender’s words, a renewed Eretz Yisrael “will prove at the same time a powerhouse which will send forth its energies to the whole house of Israel. Zion is primarily an opportunity for the Jewish people to express itself in accordance with its ancient ideals and aspirations.”
Cyrus Adler, Schechter’s successor as JTS president, found himself at odds with the political Zionism of his faculty and students. Nevertheless, Adler remained committed to developing Jewish settlement and culture in Palestine. In 1915, Adler affirmed that although he was not a political Zionist, he did think that “it could easily be recognized, upon religious grounds, even without considering political grounds, that Jews have a claim to some sort of specially favored treatment in Palestine.” This is why he did not refer to himself as a “non-Zionist” but rather as among those who were “pro-Palestinian Jews.” For example, in 1917, following the excitement of the Balfour Declaration, Adler added, “Whether it be as an independent state or under English or Turkish sovereignty, Palestine is sacred and should be for those Jews who want to go to Palestine to practice Judaism.”
Herbert Parzen, in “Architects of Conservative Judaism (1964), credits Dr. Adler for being “an important factor in the creation of the Jewish Agency for Palestine…, participating in its management and work. He helped in the building of The Hebrew University and in the shaping of its policies.”
Additionally, Adler joined in the effort to form Keren Hayesod and the United Synagogue’s mid-1920s project to build Yeshurun, an American-style synagogue center in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood. In 1926, the Adler-led JTS awarded an honorary degree to Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. Furthermore, in 1928-29 Adler launched a tradition of service by a rotation of JTS faculty as Hebrew University visiting scholars.
Nevertheless, in contrast to the type of Zionist commitments expressed by most JTS faculty and students, Adler was averse to political Zionism. In 1917, when the delegates to the United Synagogue convention voted to endorse Herzl’s political Basel Platform, Adler resigned as president. Similarly, while in his address to the JTS class of 1920, Adler “pledged his continued help in the upbuilding of Palestine,” he “turned down an invitation to join the newly established Zionist Organization of America.” Dr. Naomi Cohen explained that while influential JTS alumni such as Solomon Goldman, Israel Goldstein, Israel Levinthal, and Simon Greenberg, like Adler, “aimed for a spiritual-cultural center in Palestine…, they did not limit their Zionism to that end alone…. They optimistically viewed the Balfour Declaration as a license for a Jewish homeland. During the interwar period, the rabbis infused their congregations through the pulpit and Hebrew schools with strong Zionist sentiments.”
At JTS, with Friedlaender’s untimely death, Dr. Mordecai Kaplan emerged as the most vocal post-World War I Zionist influence. He attended the Zionist Congress in 1923 and returned as a forceful advocate. “The Zionist Congress must be regarded as a necessity in Jewish life…, as a demonstration of the unity and integrity of the Jewish people…,” he said. “The Congress has come to serve as a school where the Jew is learning his lesson in the art of politics, in the art of getting along with his brother Jew. There he learns to make compromises and to arrive peacefully at an understanding of Jewish problems.”
In his writings, culminating in “Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life” (1934), Rabbi Kaplan explained by analogy, “What soil is to the life of a tree, a land is to the civilization of a people.” Kaplan warned that “if we were to disassociate Jewish self from Palestine, and form ourselves into a religious organization pure and simple…it would not be Judaism.” Kaplan had written back in 1929, “Any healthy-minded Jew could not help but feel to the very marrow of his bones…that without Palestine reclaimed by the Jews there was nothing left for the Jews to do in the world.”
Rabbi Kaplan served as the dean of JTS’s Teachers’ Institute and its college, which influenced hundreds of future Zionists. Rabbi Moshe Davis made fond reference to the institute’s faculty of the 1930s for their “Zionist motivations,” notably Mordecai Kaplan, Morris Levine, Hillel Bavli, and Abraham Halkin. Naomi Cohen records Rabbi Davis’s observation about “the Teachers’ Institute, which emphasized Hebrew and Jewish nationalism and which propagated active Zionism among its students…. Davis himself was one of approximately 250 graduates of the TI who, as of 1959, had gone on aliya…. The Zionist stance of the Teachers’ Institute left its mark on two generations of graduates who went on to teach at Jewish day and afternoon schools…and strengthened the ties between the Zionist and Conservative movements.”
In addition to the overt Zionism among many JTS faculty and that of synagogue rabbis and United Synagogue, Conservative Judaism’s Rabbinical Assembly collectively voiced public support for Jewish statehood year after year. By 1938, the RA’s convention adopted a “Pronouncement of Zionism”: “The Zionist ideal is to establish in Palestine a legally assured and publicly recognized home for the Jewish people…. [This] has been an integral part of the religious outlook as well as the program of practical activities sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly from its very inception.” A Jewish national home would create “a political government based upon the ethical teaching of our religion…. We reaffirm our historic claim to Palestine, as the land where for more than a thousand years our fathers lived a national life and built a religious civilization….”
Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD, was religious leader of Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell, NJ, for more than four decades, retiring in 2021. He served as president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis (1993-95); as president of the World Council of Conservative/Masorti Synagogues (2000-05); and as chair of the Foundation for Masorti Judaism in Israel (2010-14). He currently serves as president of Mercaz Olami, representing the world Masorti/Conservative movement. He is the author of “It All Begins with a Date: Jewish Concerns about Interdating,” “Preserving Jewishness in Your Family: After Intermarriage Has Occurred,” and “Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of Reform Judaism to American Culture, 1840-1930.”