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  • Southern Rabbis and The Founding of The First National Association of Rabbis
  • Gary Phillip Zola (bio)

The reconstruction of the history of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) usually begins with the details of a “Preliminary Meeting” held in Detroit, Michigan, on July 9–10, 1889. At this meeting the rabbis in attendance resolved to form an association to unify the “Rabbis of America” for the purpose of “mutual co-operation, encouragement and support.” 1

As one might suspect, the antecedents of the CCAR may be traced to events that transpired long before the organization’s official beginning in 1889. Much has been written about the various rabbinical gatherings in the United States that were, in some sense, precursors to the CCAR: the Cleveland Conference (1855), 2 the Philadelphia Conference (1869), the Rabbinical Literary Association (established in 1880) 3 and, of course, the Pittsburgh Conference (1885). To one extent or another each of these gatherings was intended to serve as an enduring venue by which rabbinical leaders (and, in some instances, the laity too) could work collectively toward addressing many of the vexing questions and challenges they were experiencing. Those who attended these conferences debated the need for liturgical reform and the goals and objectives of contemporary Jewish education as well as a wide range of ritual and philosophical questions. Why did these earlier efforts fail to sustain themselves? Isaac Mayer Wise pointed to a coalescence of factors that had long hindered his early attempts to establish a permanent rabbinical organization: ideological discord, geographical isolation, and a series of intense rabbinical rivalries. 4

Yet conditions began to change during the last half of the nineteenth century. The Jewish population of the United States grew steadily as did [End Page 353] the number of rabbis and Jewish religious leaders. With this rise in Jewish population, American Jewry’s religious life became more diverse, more complicated. The need for a semblance of order and communal interaction became more evident. These factors conjoined to make the establishment of an authoritative ecclesiastical body a desideratum for Jews in America. 5

In his magnum opus, United States Jewry, Jacob Rader Marcus emphasizes the fact that by the mid-1880s American rabbis interested in “uniformity” began to organize themselves into regional conferences. Interestingly, two such regional associations began in 1885—one in the South and one in the Northeast. In summarizing the impact of these two regional conferences, Marcus notes:

With a Northern and a Southern fellowship in existence it was inevitable that a Western or Central association would ultimately arise. This new conference was called into being in 1889 by [Isaac Mayer] Wise who had sought to organize and unite the rabbis ever since the late 1840’s. 6

While it is difficult to prove the inevitability of a durable national rabbinical conference like the Central Conference, there can be little doubt that the story of these two regional associations provides us with a great deal of helpful information relating to the embryonic stages of the process that ultimately spawned the CCAR—the first permanent rabbinical conference in world Jewry. 7

The Establishment of an Eastern Conference

Soon after his arrival in this country in 1846, Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900) began to advocate a national association of American rabbis. 8 Since the early 1850s gatherings and small leagues of Jewish clergy serving in the same city had organized themselves informally. One of the most important Jewish leaders of the ante-bellum period, Isaac Leeser (1806–1868), succeeded in unifying the Jewish clergy from five of his [End Page 354] city’s traditional congregations into the Board of Jewish Ministers of Philadelphia as early as 1861. 9 Leeser’s journal, The Occident, subsequently noted that the purpose of this board was to “put an end to unauthorized parties interfering in matters which properly belong to acknowledged agents of the people, in which light the minister alone can be regarded.” It seems that the vitality of the Philadelphia Board of Jewish Ministers ebbed and flowed until, in 1885, it was unofficially incorporated into an even larger association of Jewish clergy—perhaps the first permanent regional association—centered in New York City. 10

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