Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 25

University of Michigan Professor Deborah Dash Moore begins in 1654, when Governor Peter Stuyvesant received orders from the Dutch West India Company to allow Jews in the colony. Before the century ended, New York Jews created the first synagogue. During the early republic, Charleston, South Carolina attracted the largest concentration of Jews. In 1824, a group of young Jews there petitioned for shorter services, explanations of Hebrew prayers, and a sermon in English. When the leaders rejected their requests, the young men and women established a Reformed Society of Israelites. They introduced female voices, instrumental accompaniment, and revised the prayer book.

After the Civil War, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise established the Hebrew Union College to train Reform rabbis. But at the 1883 banquet honoring the first graduates, non-kosher shellfish was served, infuriating several rabbis. They guided congregants away to establish the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), which shaped Conservative Judaism.

As a generation of American Jewish women matured, they initiated activism. Occupying pews with their husbands, women began synagogue attendance. Hannah Greenberg Solomon organized Jewish women for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. She recruited for a Jewish Women’s Congress. The National Council of Jewish Women embodied a politicized conscience.

The American Jewish Committee was formed to »prevent infringement of the civil and religious rights of Jews …« Mordecai Kaplan organized Friday night lectures on the Lower East Side that attracted modern Orthodox Jews. Within a year that congregation became Young Israel. It received guidance from Rabbi Bernard Revel, who came to lead immigrant religious educational institutions, which reorganized as Yeshiva College. Kaplan also established the Society for the Advancement of Judaism and its movement, Reconstructionism. He had already introduced the Bat Mitzvah to mark the equality of Jewish girls.

American Jews emerging from World War II created »a culture of commemoration« memorializing the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis and turned to Zionism, partly in response to the suffering of survivors. They integrated Israel into their consciousness. The three Jewish movements all included youth groups, summer camps, and sisterhoods. By the end of the postwar period, over five and a half million American Jews had transformed Judaism.