Jewish Religious Organization
Daniel J. Elazar
Today every Jewish community is organized through a mixture
of territorially and nonterritorially based institutions.1 Local
political units are, with some modifications, used as the basis
for the organization of local Jewish communities throughout the
world. At the same time, the ideological and functional
divisions in the Jewish community also provide significant points
for organization as do particular functions and certain common
interests, which are then linked to the territorial community
through certain common mechanisms.
The territorially based organizations such as the Jewish
community federations in the United States and Canada, local
authorities in Israel, or the state boards of Jewish deputies in
Australia are invariable the most comprehensive ones, charged
with providing direction for the community as a whole or some
segment of it. The ideological, functional, and interest-based
organizations such as the synagogues or the social services
agencies generally touch the more personal aspects of Jewish
life. The two bases of communal organization are recognizable
distinct as such, but the specific units of organization are
usually demarcated much less distinctly.
Because of the nature of the Jewish community, the
territorially based organizations do not necessarily have
clear-cut boundaries. This situation is not a particular problem
with Jews because Jewish political culture views boundaries from
a West-Asian rather than an Anglo-American perspective. For
Jews, the world is divided into oases and deserts rather than
into clear-cut territorial plots. Every oasis has a clear core
and shifting periphery as it fades into the desert at the
shifting edge of the watered area, which changes with changes in
the internal water supply of the oasis. The desert, in turn,
belongs to nobody or everybody. Thus the periphery can expand or
contract without significantly changing the character of the
core. Both Jewish law and Jewish political organization are
structured in this way. For traditional Jews, law consists of a
hard, immutable core (the Torah), surrounded by layers of
interpretive applications, each of which becomes bonded to the
original over time, expanding the whole corpus. Thus, Jewish
culture has come to look upon law as requiring a fixed core of
observance with room for interpretation at the peripheries. Jews
are bound to but not bounded by their law. Its observance is, in
the last analysis, a personal responsibility reinforced by
community expectations and pressures. Both clearly reflect the
situation in the land of Israel and the Middle East as a whole.
Western European institutions in contrast took form in
well-watered countries, where lands are divided by fixed
boundaries that serve as receptacles. Status is determined by
who is inside a particular set of boundaries and who is not.
Normally, there are no lands outside boundaries in the Western
European world. For Europeans then, the core is far less
important than the fixed boundaries.2 In many respects, local
territorial communities are simply aggregates of Jews in
particular cities or metropolitan areas.
Much the same pattern prevails with regard to
ideologically-based organizations. By and large the ideologies
of the late modern epoch have lost their power to attract. Once
powerful Zionist movements survive as Israeli political parties,
vehicles for individuals to obtain leadership positions in the
Jewish community or by performing specific tasks within the
community. Organizations representing the non-Zionist secular
ideologies hardly survive at all. The "oasis" pattern describes
their reality.
The religious movements have fared better, particularly a
resurgent Orthodoxy. Throughout the world a new ideologically
militant Orthodoxy has emerged, using a new network of yeshivot
as their nuclei. While the core of Orthodox Judaism has grown
extensively, it is still true that, outside of Israel and the
United States, few members of Orthodox congregations throughout
the world are seriously Orthodox. This is even more true of the
Conservative and Reform movements, which are built around even
smaller cores of serious Conservative and Reform Jews with large
masses of more casual members attracted to their respective
congregations by location, habit, family and friendship patterns,
if not by historical or geographic accident. In the orthodox
camp, where ideology takes traditionally religious forms,
ideological groupings have succeeded in maintaining themselves
and their ideologies in organized form. As yet they represent
small if vital minorities within the Jewish people. Their
vitality already has given them a weight beyond their numbers.
For the polity as a whole, ideologically based organizations
have had more success on a worldwide or countrywide basis where
the absence of comprehensive territorial institutions has been
marked, than on the local plane. All told, however, modernity
emphasized the territorial over the nonterritorial elements
wherever given half a chance and to reduce ideologically based
organizations to functional specialists responsible for specific
tasks.
A major result of this has been to limit the powers of the
countrywide organizations in the diaspora and to make the primary
locus of decision making for those communities local. This takes
two forms. In one, the dominant local community either
constitutes or captures well nigh total control of the
countrywide Jewish organizations, so that they, in essence,
express the perspective and interests of that community. This is
the pattern in countries like Sweden and France.
In the other form, the countrywide organizations are weak
compared with the local ones and are either ignored or
manipulated by the local ones as they deem necessary. That is the
pattern in the United States and Brazil. In a few cases,
Australia, South Africa, and Switzerland, for example the
countrywide organizations do have a significant independent
standing. Only in Israel, where the countrywide organizations
are either state institutions or closely intertwined with the
state, do they play a dominant role as such, not as extensions of
some local community or congeries of local communities.
What emerges is not a single pyramidal structure, not even
one in which the "bottom" rules the "top" as is sometimes
suggested on the organization charts. There is no "bottom" or
"top" except on a functional basis for specific purposes (if
then). Instead there is a matrix of organizations and
institutions linked by a shared communications network and
stronger or weaker training institutions. This absence of
hierarchy is the first element to recognize in examining how Jews
make their institutions work.3
The Role of Functional Groupings
In the context described above, the institutions and
organizations of the Jewish polity group themselves in five major
spheres of public activity: (1) religious-congregational, (2)
educational-cultural, (3) external relations-defense, (4)
communal-welfare, and (5) Israel-world Jewry.4 This
article continues its focus to the religious-congregational
sphere.
Contemporary synagogues provide the immediately personal and
interpersonal ritual-cum-social functions demanded by the
community and, inmost countries, do so primarily through highly
independent individual congregations. The congregations have a
monopoly of those functions locally; the synagogue
confederations, rabbinical associations, seminaries, and yeshivot
maintain a parallel monopoly of the community's organized
religious and halakhic concerns countrywide. The only
new-style institutions to have emerged in this sphere in the
postwar period are the religious study and research centers.
These include bodies such as CLAL in the United States and the
Pardes and Shalom Hartman institutes in Israel, which offer
religious motivation and instruction to Jews seeking to reconnect
with Jewish religious tradition.
Locally, the congregations may be supplemented by such
manifestations of Orthodoxy (occasionally paralleled in the
Conservative movement) as a rabbinical court and kashrut council.
In the larger communities, there are also "Orthodox outposts,"
yeshivot or branches of the Lubavitcher movement that serve (and
try to develop) special constituencies. In addition,
intercongregational regional organizations and boards of rabbis
are in the larger local communities.
Countrywide, the synagogues are organized according to one of
four models, as unions, federations, confederations, or leagues
or some combination thereof. France and Britain offer two models
of synagogue unions. The French consistoire, established in
Napoleonic times, follows a classically centralized model. It
was a veritable instrument of the state for most of the
nineteenth century, until the French separated church and state
in 1905. It remained dominant in the community until World War
II but subsequently became secondary to the CRIF, the
representative body of French Jewry, and the FSJU, the
community's functioning arm.
Although the structure of the consistoire was changed from
time to time, its basic form has remained constant. It is
centered in Paris with regional consistorial bodies either
subsidiary to Paris or dependent on it, with only Alsace-Lorraine
outside the model because of its special political status as a
disputed territory between Germany and France. The chief rabbi
of the Consistoire Central is the chief rabbi of France. He is
supported by a small conseil laique. All synagogues are
technically the property of the consisoire in which they are
located, and rabbis are formally appointed by the appropriate
consistorial body.5
The United Synagogue, the dominant synagogue body in Britain
is somewhat less centralized in the British style. There, too,
member synagogues are owned by the common body, which must
approve the appointment of congregational rabbis, all of whom are
under the authority of the Ashkenazic chief rabbi. In Britain,
the board of the United Synagogue has somewhat greater authority
vis-a-vis the chief rabbi than in France, because France is more
hierarchical in its organizational culture. Boards in Britain
consist of persons with independent bases in the community.
Moreover, except in areas of doctrinal controversy, the United
Synagogue rules its member congregations with a lighter hand,
allowing a measure of decentralization roughly parallel to that
which Parliament allows British local authorities.6
The South African Federation of Synagogues is a good example
of the federation model. Individual congregations are
independent to the extent that they are owned by their members
who appoint their own rabbis but are bound closely with one
another under the authority of the chief rabbi of South Africa.7
The American model offers the best example of the use of
confederations and leagues. Three great synagogue
confederations, for the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform
movements, plus a smaller one for the Reconstructionist movement
and various subsidiary leagues within the Orthodox community
embrace most of the permanent synagogues in the United States.
However, because every congregation is independent and
self-contained under the law - the private preserve of its
members - there is no need for it to be a member of any larger
body if its members choose not to be. Hence many congregations
are independent and many others are nominal members of the
countrywide bodies. Consequently, the latter have little power
aside from that of professional placement. Even then, every
congregation, no matter how committed it may be to its movement,
hires its own rabbinical staff, under its own terms, in what
amounts to a free market situation.8 The controlling power of
the individual synagogues in the religious-congregational sphere
in the United States means that a large share of Jewish activity
-involving nearly half the total local expenditure of American
Jewry - is raised and managed outside any communal
decision-making system.
In 1926, their common quest for an expanded role in American
Jewish life, the three great synagogue confederations formed a
league, the Synagogue Council of America. For a few years during
the height of the "religious revival" of the 1950's, it tried to
capture the leading role as spokesman for American Jewry.
Nominally, it is the Jewish religious counterpart to the National
Council of Churches and the Catholic Council of Bishops but does
not actually play such a role. Its principal function today is
to provide the only religious forum where representatives of
Orthodoxy, Conservatism, and Reform still meet on common issues.
Each synagogue confederation has a seminary, which, because
of its academic character, projects itself on the American Jewish
scene in a quasi-independent way. Even with the growth of Judaic
studies programs in academic institutions, these seminaries
remain the backbone of organized Jewish scholarship in the United
States. Their alumni lead the congregations of American Jewry
and, through their rabbinical associations, link their seminaries
and the confederations.
There are also a growing number of yeshivot in New York and
other major Jewish communities that reflect the great growth and
proliferation of the new ultra-Orthodox elements in the
community. They preserve and extend traditional Jewish
scholarship on a scale never before experienced in American
Jewish history.
In Israel, the religious-congregational sphere is divided
between the formal institutions of the state and thousands of
small independent congregations. Some have buildings and
activities apart from worship services but most are limited to
places of worship with traditional study circles attached and
occasional events such as evenings of liturgical music or
lectures by prominent rabbinical personalities. Through the
Ministry of Religions and the local religious councils, the state
provides a variety of religious services. The state-appointed
and supported rabbinical courts deal with the most practical
manifestations of Jewish law particularly in matters of personal
status, which are exclusively under their jurisdiction. Thus the
Israeli dichotomy is such that the congregations themselves play
no role in the governance of the Jewish polity and confine
themselves to most local religious activities; while the major
governmental institution of the Jewish polity, the State of
Israel, provides all other services directly or through local
religious councils, arms of municipal government.
Since World War II, there have been some tentative but real
steps toward the development of world-wide institutions in the
religious-congregational sphere. Formally, these include the
world leagues of synagogues that are tied to each of the major
branches of Judaism. Although they have developed a presence of
sorts, they remain tertiary institutions in the overall scheme of
things, established, maintained, and directed from the United
States, or by Americans who have relocated in Israel. All three
have joined the World Zionist Organization (WZO), which invited
them to do so in an effort to strengthen its position on the
Jewish scene vis-a-vis the reconstituted Jewish Agency, which is
increasingly dominated by the local community federations. The
WZO, in turn, has bolstered the three worldwide synagogue
movements by providing them with a way to participate in world
Jewish politics, and supplying them with funds enabling them to
do so far beyond what their countrywide congregational bodies are
prepared to provide.
Much stronger are the worldwide bodies of the ultra-Orthodox,
including Agudath Israel, Habad (the Lubavitcher movement), and
other Hassidic communities that emanate from the
religious-congregational sphere but extend their work beyond that
sphere into most of the others. All of these bodies are
considerably older than the world synagogue leagues, but all,
even those whose movement antecedents go back to the eighteenth
century, are essentially twentieth-century phenomena. Agudath
Israel was founded in 1912 and, in many respects, serves as an
umbrella organization for most of them. A federation of
movements of the ultra-Orthodox camp, it is built around three
recognizable elements from eastern Europe: the communities of
the Lithuanian yeshivot, Polish ultra-Orthodoxy, and the
Hungarian-Romanian Hassidic courts. Each of the three has its
representatives in the Israeli Knesset through the party10 to the
extent that they choose.
Unlike the world synagogue leagues, Agudath Israel has
structured a comprehensive subpolity within the Jewish people.
The Council of Torah Sages, maintains the upper hand by explicit
design, but this does not lessen the reality of subordinate set
of professional politicians occupying appropriate positions in
the Jewish world, and the various Hassidic groups have elaborated
structures, with Habad having the most extensive. Though they,
too, emerge from this sphere to overlap into others, they are
somewhat more confined to the mainstream concerns of the sphere
though in their own way.11
The Israeli rabbinate is a real force in the
religious-congregational sphere throughout the Jewish world by
virtue of its role in determining the personal status of
individual Jews in Israel. In an age of jet travel and growing
population interchange between Israel and the diaspora, such
decisions have ramifications that reverberate throughout the
Jewish world. In this connection, the Israeli Knesset has
acquired unsought influence in the religious-congregational
sphere, the first "secular" body anywhere to do so, simply
because of its central role in defining "Who is a Jew" for
purposes of Israeli law in a situation where religion and state
are intertwined. The religious-congregational sphere is in the
curious situation of, on one hand, being a powerful influence on
all Jews, yet unable to mobilize even half of them in any formal
relationship to religious institutions in the diaspora. With
the exception of those few communities that still maintain
community-wide registration of Jews, membership in synagogues or
congregations is voluntary and if one chooses not to affiliate
with some religious body, one is simply not affiliated. Thus in
the United States perhaps 50 percent of the Jewish community
maintains a synagogue affiliation at any give time, though
approximately three-quarters of all Jews will have been
affiliated with a synagogue at some time or another. In France,
membership figures are even lower.
In Israel, where a different pattern of affiliation prevails,
the "membership" figure is undoubtedly much lower, but then every
Jew is linked to the religious-congregational sphere through his
or her being bound as a Jew to halakhic laws of personal status
through the state's rabbinate and religious institutions.
In a sense this situation reflects the different stages or
directions of modernization in the Jewish world. In pre-modern
times, all Jews were doubly bound by halakhah and by the social
pressure of the community to be substantially observant. Today
the binding force of halakhah or an other than voluntary basis
has mostly disappeared except in Israel, where it has been
reduced to the area of personal status. So, too, social pressure
no longer prevails except where people choose to be part of
subcommunities of observant Jews. Otherwise, the character and
extent of linkage with the religious-congregational affiliation
to being part of a Jewish community in which the religious
dimension is built in. The only issue in which all Jews may be
subject to some kind of binding decision-making is in determining
Jewishness itself, that is to say, "Who is a Jew," where, because
of the influence of Israel, the decisions of its authoritative
institutions on this question are authoritative for the Jewish
world as a whole.
Notes
1. The combination of territorial and nonterritorial patterns of
communal organization is clearly portrayed for the diaspora
in the American Jewish Year Book (published annually since
1899 by the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish
Publication Society of America). See also S. P.Goldberg, The
American Jewish Community: Its Structure, Role and
Organizations (New York: Women's ORT Community Service
Publication, 1968); Howard R. Penniman, ed., Israel at the
Polls: The Knesset Elections of 1977 (Washington, D.C.:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
1979); Daniel J. Elazar with Peter Medding, Jewish
Communities in Frontier Societies: Argentina, Australia, and
South Africa (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983); and Daniel
J. Elazar and Stuart A. Cohen, The Jewish Polity (Bloomington,
Ind: Indiana University Press, 1984).
2. See Max Kadushin, Organic Thinking: A Study in Rabbinic
Thought (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1938);
Elazar and Medding, Jewish Communities in Frontier Societies,
pp. 80-82; Daniel J. Elazar, "Land Space and Civil Society in
America," in Land Settlement Policy (Raleigh, N.C.: North
Carolina State University, 1969).
3. Ernest Stock describes this phenomenon in "The Absence of
Hierarchy: Notes on the Organization of the American Jewish
Community, Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol. 21, no.2
(December 1970), pp. 195-200.
4. See Daniel J. Elazar, Community and Polity: The
Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), chap. 5.
5. Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry:
Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University Press, 1977); Paula Hyman, From
Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906-1939
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
6. Chiai HaYehudim be-Britania (Jewish Life in Britain), issue
of Tefutsot Yisrael, vol 21, no. 4 (Winter 1983) (Hebrew);
Sonia L. Lipman and Vivian D. Lipman, Jewish Life in Britain
1962-1977 (New York: K. G. Sauer, 1981); V. D. Lipman, ed.,
Three Centuries of Anglo-Jewish History (London: The Jewish
Historical Society of England, 1961).
7. Elazar and Medding, Jewish Communities in Frontier Societies,
chap.12; Steven B. Aschheim, "The Communal Organization of
South African Jewry," Jewish Journal of Sociology, vol 12,
no. 1 (June 1970), pp. 201-31. (Reprinted by the Center for
Jewish Community Studies.)
8. Yihudo veAtido shel Beit-Haknesset be America (The American
Synagogue: Its Uniqueness and Future), issue of Tefutsot
Israel, vol 20, no. 3, (Summer 1982) (hebrew); Moshe Davis,
The Emergence of Conservative Judaism (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society of America, 1963); Leonard J. Fein, et.
al., Reform Is a Verb (New York: Union of American Hebrew
Congregations, 1972); Leon Jick, "An Intimate Portrait of the
Union of American Hebrew Congregations: A Centennial
Documentary," American Jewish Archive, vol. 25 (April 1973),
pp. 3-115; Charles S. Liebman, "Orthodoxy in American Jewish
Life," American Jewish Year Book 1965, vol 66, pp. 21-97;
Gunther W. Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism (New York:
World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1963-65); Marshall
Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement
(New York: Schocken Books, 1972); Joseph L. Blau, Reform
Judaism: A Historical Perspective (New York: Ktav, 1973);
Jacob Neusner, ed., Sectors of American Judaism: Reform, Orthodoxy, Conservative and Reconstructionism (New York:
Ktav, 1975).
9. S.Z. Abromov, Perpetual Dilemma (Rutherford, N. J.:
Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976); Zvi Yaron,
"Religion in Israel," American Jewish Year Book 1976, vo. 76,
pp.41-90; Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Religion
and Politics in Israel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 1984).
10. Menachem Friedman, Havrah ve Hadat: HaOrthodoxiya Halo
Tzionit be Eretz Yisrael 1918-1936 (The Non-Zionist Orthodox
Movement in the Land of Israel), (Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak
Ben-Zvi, 1978) (Hebrew); Joseph Friedenson, A History of
Agudat Israel (New York: Agudath Israel of America, 1970);
Eliezer Don-Yehiya, "Origins and Development of the Agudah
and Mafdal Parties," Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 20 (Summer
1981), pp. 49-64; Yaakov Rosenheim Memorial Anthology: A
Concise History of Agudat Israel (New York: Orthodox
Library, 1968).
11. Jerome R. Mintz, "Ethnic Activism: The Hassidic Example,"
Judaism, vol. 28, no. 4 (Fall 1979), pp. 449-64; Harry M.
Rabinowicz, A Guide to Hassidism (New York: T. Yoseloff,
1960); Israel Rubin, Satmar: An Island in the City (Chicago:
Quardrangle, 1972).
