18
Counter- Reform
In 1883 the Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who dreamed of a compre-
hensive union of all American synagogues under his leadership, presided
at the ordination of the first rabbis to graduate from the new Hebrew
Union College, holding a banquet in Cincinnati to which all sections of
the religious community were invited. The meal was a disaster. It began
with clams, shrimp, crab, lobster and frog legs in cream sauce, with beef
as the main and cheese as the final course. Wise claimed that the menu
was simply an error by the caterers, who did not understand kosher
food restrictions and had at least avoided pork. But a number of the
diners left ostentatiously and a furore erupted over the following
months, played out primarily in the Jewish press in the United States.
It was rare for orthodox reaction to Reform to take a violent turn,
but we have already noted the burning in Syria of a Bible commentary
by Eliyahu Benamozegh some two decades earlier (Chapter 17). In
Lemberg, in September 1848, an orthodox Jew named Abraham Ber
Pilpel killed the Reform rabbi of the town, Abraham Kohn, by slipping
into his kitchen and poisoning the family’s soup with arsenic – the first
known case since antiquity of religiously motivated murder of one
Jew by another. But most opposition – however visceral – took an oral
or written form. Some orthodox leaders adopted a more eirenic
approach: thus on 27 May 1934 Joseph H. Hertz, chief rabbi of the
British Empire, and spokesman for mainstream orthodox Judaism in
England, attended the consecration of the new Reform synagogue in
London, asserting roundly: ‘I am the last person in the world to mini-
mise the significance of religious difference in Jewry. If I have nevertheless
decided to be with you this morning, it is because of my conviction that
far more calamitous than religious difference in Jewry is religious in -
difference in Jewry.’
Such an appeal to solidarity among all religious groups in the face of
rampant secularism still has a certain force, particularly in Europe. But