It’s sad to see such a religious organization ending its college outreach program when balance among the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements is needed.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor reports.

Sadly, Conservative Judaism’s lead ship is sinking fast

In February 1913, Rabbi Solomon Schechter founded the United Synagogue of America — which in 1991 became the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism — to “advance the cause of traditional Judaism in America and strengthen the conservative tendency in Israel.”

Schechter’s vision of traditional Judaism lives on in communities, but the organization he founded has lost its mandate to fulfill this mission.

Last week, USCJ closed down Koach, the college outreach organization of the Conservative movement. One of many anguished Conservative Jewish college students on Facebook interpreted this as the USCJ “signing their own death warrant.”

Were this the only recent experience of the USCJ cutting off its own future, one would already worry. But Koach is not an exception to the rule. It demonstrates the pervasive reality of too few USCJ staff spread way too thinly to meet a too-meager definition of movement success.

Honestly, as a product of the Conservative movement, I am very saddened by this. In moments of budgetary woe, it is all about money. But that cuts both ways: Lack of funding demonstrates lack of resonance and vitality. The USCJ has for decades failed to actualize the vibrancy of Conservative Judaism’s founding ideas and is currently dying the slow, painful death of a thousand paper cuts.

The greatest tragedy of all this is that it need not be.

The American Conservative movement is declining numerically not because Schechter’s vision is meaningless. It is because we, as Conservative Jewish leaders, have forgotten how right he was, what a gift Conservative Judaism truly is.