by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement) Expressions of Zionism have continued to proliferate throughout the Conservative movement in recent decades. In my synagogue — where I served as senior rabbi from 1979 to 2021, the Israeli flag stood on the bimah side-by-side with the American flag. The Prayer […]
by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement) Parallel to expanding Zionist activity among America’s Conservative Jews was the effort to establish a Conservative Jewish presence in Israel. Initially, the movement in Israel was very small, consisting only of Emet V’Emunah, the first Conservative synagogue in the country, established in […]
by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement) The initial effort to extend Conservative Judaism’s embrace of Zionism beyond the United States was launched by Rabbi Bernard Segal, who served as executive director of United Synagogue of America (later United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism) from 1953 to 1970. As noted […]
by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement) Soon after the outbreak of World War II, Jewish Theological Seminary chancellor Dr. Cyrus Adler passed away, and leadership of the JTS and of Judaism’s Conservative Movement was placed into the hands of Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, a JTS graduate and longtime assistant […]
by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement) In Professor Naomi Cohen’s “Diaspora Plus Palestine, Religion Plus Nationalism: The Seminary and Zionism” (“Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America,” Vol. 2), she emphasized Solomon Schechter’s early adherence — already in the 1880s — to […]
by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement) The European roots of Zionism in Conservative Judaism commenced with an emphasis on Jewish history and peoplehood as espoused by Rabbi Zechariah Frankel in the mid-19th century. Rabbi Frankel had withdrawn from the German rabbinical conferences of the 1840s due […]