496 A History of Judaism
Kaplan’s Reconstructionism was viewed with suspicion and hostility
by others on the faculty at the Jewish Theological Seminary, among
them the great Talmud scholar Saul Lieberman, who had trained in
yeshivot in Belorussia before coming to the Seminary in 1940 after
more than a decade studying and teaching at the new Hebrew Univer-
sity in Jerusalem. Despite their intellectual openness to the historical
origins of all aspects of Judaism, most of these teachers were tempera-
mentally inclined to tradition in synagogue liturgy. It was a debate
within the Seminary itself in the early 1980s on the ordination of women
by the Seminary that led another great talmudist, David Weiss Halivni,
to form a separate organization, the Union for Traditional Conservative
Judaism, which since 1990 has broken away entirely from the Con-
servative movement (and dropped ‘Conservative’ from its name). The
Union for Traditional Judaism has opened its own rabbinical school,
but it has not, as yet, had a major impact on Conservative congrega-
tions in North America, which are, if anything, generally more inclined
towards a laxer observance than their rabbis. Indeed, Conservative
Judaism of all shades is in something of a crisis as congregants abandon
the centre ground it represents, either in hope of a deeper spirituality
within one of the orthodox or independent renewal movements, or for
the more pluralist Judaism of Reform, or indeed for a wholly secular
form of Jewish identity, or none.^24
In view of the enthusiasm about Zionism within the Conservative
movement from the start, it is perhaps ironic that this form of Judaism
has never become widespread in the land of Israel, where it is known as
Masorti, in part because Masorti leaders were not included in the estab-
lishment of the so- called Status Quo which has governed relations
between the secular state and rabbinic authorities since 1948. Until
recently most Israeli Masorti Jews, like most Israeli Reform Jews, were
from families of recent immigrants from the United States, although
secular native Israelis have begun increasingly to turn to Masorti, as
well as Reform, practices for life rituals such as weddings and funerals.
Outreach by the Jewish Theological Seminary to unaffiliated Jews in the
former Soviet Union since the 1990s seems to have had little impact.
Elsewhere in the diaspora there has been rather more enthusiasm, with
a flourishing Conservative rabbinical seminary, the Seminario Rabínico
Latinoamericano, founded in 1962 in Buenos Aires in Argentina on the
model of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
In the United Kingdom, Louis Jacobs, who, unusually for an English
rabbi, had been trained entirely in England (in yeshivot in Manchester