Sore point II…
For example – here’s a program developed by the Reform movement’s youth group (NFTY or TYG or something) program coordinator for use in Reform Temples.
Let’s see, you need brown paper bags, yarn, glitter, white glue, etc…because, you know, you need to make sure to poison them when they’re really little with stuff like the following (verbatim from the project):
Orthodox Jews point of view concerning the Reform movement:
-Less religious, therefore less Jewish
-Not real Jews because we don’t observe properly
If commenters are going to be regulated, then bloggers/posters should follow the same rules.
(1) It’s inaccurate. The program clearly is from someone’s personal page, not from an official national UAHC site. It’s sitting on a private ISP website. A little sleuthing does reveal (http://nfty.org/whatisnfty/pastleadership.html) that Melanie Ross was Programming Vice President of the National Federation of Temple Youth in 1999-2000, but there is nothing to indicate that the program on her private page was even ever _used_. Also, these are elected high-school student positions, so the excesses and inaccuracies are those of a minor, not of an adult in a function representative of the UAHC as a whole.
(2) It’s inflammatory. “Poison them”???
I second the motion of R. Ballabon that we must categorically reject the claim that he found in a Reform source that states :
Orthodox Jews’ point of view concerning the Reform movement:
-Less religious, therefore less Jewish
-Not real Jews because we don’t observe properly
However, how can we explain that many people who underwent Reform conversion and children whose mothers were not Jewish but whose fathers are, are not considered Jewish according to halakha? (They also aren’t considered Jewish by the Conservative movement).
Rabbi Reinman had a very beautiful expression in a letter he posted a short while ago to a Reform convert. He wrote: “About non-Orthodox conversions, let me just say that I cannot look at you as … Jewish…, since I do not recognize a conversion that does not conform with Halachah. But I do look at you as a righteous gentile who has a yearning to be Jewish, and who knows where this yearning may lead him one day?”
How do we convey two seemingly contradictory concepts: that Reform Jews are every bit as real Jews as Orthodox and yet a growing percentage of Jews who belong to Reform temples are not Jewish ?