The United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism’s Centennial Conference starts this weekend. The Conservative movement’s health, particularly its synagogue arm, USCJ, is not great. My previous post focused on the suburbanization of Conservative Judaism. The rapid decline of USCJ-affiliated synagogues is…
The United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism’s Centennial Conference starts this weekend. It comes at a time when the future direction and health of the movement is unclear. This series of posts will examine one of the factors behind the movement’s…
Thanks to the beginning of the school year, there has been the usual crop of published opinions regarding Jewish schooling options. The general consensus of opinions regarding Hebrew schools seems to be that, “the investment in money and time exceeds the perceived value of…
Supporters of the Conservative movement’s college organization, KOACH, have been trying for the last several years to convince the movement’s congregational organization, USCJ, to keep supporting it. It seems like this saga is finally over. USCJ has decided to shut…
Rabbi Steven Wernick, the top professional at USCJ, recently wrote an op-ed, Re-engineered United Synagogue has made great strides. This was a response to JTA article $5 million budget hole is latest woe for Conservative synagogue group. Rabbi Wernick complains…
Israel’s Documented Story started posting last June and it’s been an interesting read. It’s an English language blog run by The Israel State Archives. They’ve been posting and commenting on documents, including recently declassified documents in the archvies. Here are…
Rabbi Ed Feinstein and Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas wrote a dialogue between a father and a son on why the son doesn’t want to attend high holiday services at his father’s synagogue. It’s an interesting discussion and worth a read:…
Koach is the Conservative movement’s organization for the benefit of college students. Since I was critical of some of their recent challenges I wanted to also note something positive. In advance of their next planning meeting (in about 1.5 weeks),…
Back in June, the leaders of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism tried to defund their college program, Koach. While the USCJ board delayed this step, it seems like USCJ is still trying to separate from non-synagogue programs. The Schechter…
I recently wrote about USCJ’s proposal to defund their college student program, KOACH. As typical for USCJ, this plan was made without much public discussion. Even after the proposal became public, the only formal USCJ response was essentially: We wanted…