NEW YORK — A Conservative seminary in Los Angeles has ended its residency program with Machon Schechter in Jerusalem, the only institution that ordains Conservative rabbis in Israel.
Beginning this fall, third-year students at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies will spend their Israel year in Jerusalem at the Conservative Yeshiva, an institute for Diaspora Jews at the Fuchsberg Center of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism.
Both Ziegler and the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York have ideological differences with Schechter’s rabbinical school, whose dean, Rabbi Einat Ramon, has declined to follow the American schools in changing their policy to admit openly gay and lesbian students, following a decision by the movement’s Jewish law authorities in late 2006.
Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano, the movement’s seminary in Argentina, also declined to change its policies.
Last year, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Ziegler’s dean, responded to reports that Ziegler students were uncomfortable with the prospect of studying at Schechter.
“What I’ve discussed with Schechter is that our students have to not be tolerated guests. They need to feel a rapport,” Rabbi Artson told JTA.
Rabbi David Golinkin, Schechter’s president, told JTA, “We’ve been told repeatedly by the people at Ziegler that this is not about the gay issue. We take them at their word.”
Others in the movement are less convinced. They point to a controversy that arose when visiting American students at Schechter organized a ceremony to mark the one-year anniversary of the decision to permit gay ordination, but then decided to move the event off campus.
The American and international arms of the Conservative movement have drifted apart gradually on a number of hot-button questions in recent years, including the status of non-egalitarian congregations.
Last year, three Toronto-area synagogues cited both financial concerns and “philosophical differences” in explaining their decision to break off from the United Synagogue.
Rabbi Danny Nevins, the new dean of the JTS rabbinical school, told JTA that while the seminary is committed to “co-operation [with Schechter], we will also be expanding our partnership” with the Israeli branch of the Conservative synagogue movement, known as Masorti, “as well as with other Israeli organizations.”
