March 26: Reform Judaism Gets Its Start

Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism in America, died on this date in Cincinnati in 1900. Wise emigrated here from Bohemia in 1846 and took a pulpit in Albany, where he introduced mixed-gender seating and choral singing and counted women as part of the minyan. By the following year Wise was calling upon all American Jews to unite in a single liberal denomination and had prepared a prayerbook manuscript, eventually published as Minhag America, which he conceived as the unifying siddur of the future. It was Wise who introduced the tripartite system of a rabbinical college, a congregational umbrella organization, and a rabbinical association, which became the model for all the denominations of Judaism (except Jewish secularism), and it was under his leadership that the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) took form. Also on this date, in 2003, Rabbi Janet Marder became the first woman to lead a major rabbinical organization when she took command of the CCAR as president.

“[W]hat life is about, in the end . . . [is] not our beliefs or intentions, but the courage to take a stand and to do what needs to be done.” —Janet Marder