Word: herberger
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...Soviet Russia's boasts is that it has wiped out antiSemitism, guaranteed equal rights to its 2,000,000 Jews. In Manhattan last week, free-lance Jewish Scholar Will Herberg analyzed the record...
...Herberg's conclusion: "What decades of Czarist persecution could not do, Communist totalitarianism seems on the verge of accomplishing-the stifling of every form of Jewish expression, the total extinction of Jewish existence...
Hidden Sparks. The U.S. synagogue is no longer a community of believers, Herberg says. "This means that, in a very, basic respect, the synagogue of today is no longer the synagogue of the entire Jewish past. There have always been unbelievers . . . but in former times these people . . . were held in reproach by themselves and their fellow Jews. Only since the last century, and perhaps only in the past generation or two, has it become 'normal' for ... synagogue members to believe in and observe nothing in particular. This is surely something portentous...
Those who think the Jewish community can be rebuilt on a secular rather than religious basis, Author Herberg warns, are deluded. A return to religious essentials is necessary, and it will call for "an earnest effort to seek out and gather the sparks of faith hidden among the fragments of contemporary Jewish existence. It involves the return of the rabbi from his present functions as administrator, political leader and popular lecturer, to his earlier and more authentic role of religious teacher and counselor. Most of all, it implies a synagogue interested primarily not in making itself dominant as an organization...
...According to Herberg "the best information would seem to indicate that in 1949 the Conservative United Synagogue of America had 365 synagogues affiliated with it, the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations had 392, and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations 500, with an unknown number of congregations, largely Orthodox, unaffiliated...