SpikeToronto

Kristallnacht! 9–10 November 1938, in color. 88 years ago tonight, Nazi SA members, Hitler Youth, and civilians attacked Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses across Germany and Austria. Shop windows were smashed, the word “Jude” was painted on storefronts, and streets were filled with broken glass. Roughly 7,500 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and dozens of people were killed. These colorized photographs show the aftermath: passers-by walking past shattered shop windows and uniformed men standing amid the debris of a ransacked store. Never forget!

New Video Alert: The Pale of Settlement: How the Russian Empire Confined Millions of Jews to This Border (1791–1917)

New video about the subject! youtu.be/7CYQ4pqCxlA

The history of Conservative Judaism Conservative Judaism took shape as a middle path that sought to conserve traditional Jewish practice while accepting the tools of modern historical scholarship. Its intellectual roots lie in mid nineteenth century Germany with Zacharias Frankel. Frankel called his approach positive historical Judaism. He insisted that Jewish law and custom carry binding force because they express the living experience of the Jewish people across generations, yet he also allowed that the tradition has always developed over time. At the 1845 rabbinical conference in Frankfurt he broke with the emerging Reform movement when it proposed sharply reducing the use of Hebrew in the service. In 1854 he became the first head of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, where his outlook trained a generation of rabbis who valued both rigorous study and continuity with earlier practice. The American movement emerged in direct response to the radical direction of Reform. In 1883 the first class of rabbis ordained at Hebrew Union College was honored at a banquet that served non kosher food. The episode, known as the trefa banquet, shocked traditionalists. Two years later the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 rejected many ritual laws and the idea of Jewish peoplehood. In 1886 a group of moderate rabbis and lay leaders, including Sabato Morais, founded the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York to train rabbis who would uphold Mosaic law while remaining open to historical inquiry and American life. The seminary struggled until 1902, when Solomon Schechter arrived from Cambridge University as its president. Schechter was a major scholar of the Cairo Geniza and an advocate of what he called Catholic Israel, the idea that the consensus of the observant Jewish people over time is the ultimate source of religious authority. Under his leadership the seminary became a serious center of learning. In 1913 he helped establish the United Synagogue of America as the congregational body of the movement. Schechter and his students presented a Judaism that retained Hebrew liturgy, Sabbath and dietary observance, and the authority of Jewish law, while allowing measured change justified by historical study rather than by abstract philosophy alone. The movement grew rapidly with the children and grandchildren of Eastern European immigrants who wanted a form of Judaism that felt familiar yet compatible with American education and suburbia. After the Second World War it became the largest Jewish denomination in the United States for a time, as new congregations appeared across the expanding suburbs. Its motto was tradition and change. Later decades saw internal debates over the ordination of women, the role of historical criticism, and the proper pace of legal adaptation. Institutions such as the Rabbinical Assembly and the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards gave the movement a process for deciding questions of practice. Conservative Judaism remains defined by its effort to hold both loyalty to the inherited legal tradition and openness to responsible development. Its history is the record of that ongoing attempt to keep Jewish life continuous with the past while remaining livable in the present. Zachariah Frankel, JTS NYC, Solomon Shechter Follow for more.

The History of Reform Judaism Reform Judaism is the story of Jews confronting modernity after the walls of the European ghettos began to fall. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emancipation promised legal equality and social acceptance. Many German Jews wanted to remain Jewish while fully joining the surrounding culture. They looked to the Enlightenment and the Haskalah for tools that would let them keep ethical monotheism and prophetic ideals without practices that set them apart from their neighbors. The first concrete steps came from Israel Jacobson, a lay leader in Westphalia. In 1810 he held what is widely regarded as the first Reform service in a school chapel in Seesen. The liturgy was in German rather than Hebrew. An organ and choir accompanied the prayers. Confirmation ceremonies were introduced for both boys and girls. These changes spread. In 1818 the Hamburg Temple opened as the first permanent Reform congregation. Its founders deliberately called the building a temple rather than a synagogue. They omitted prayers for the restoration of sacrifices and for a return to Zion, signaling that they no longer awaited a messianic restoration of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Intellectual leadership soon followed. Abraham Geiger argued that Judaism had always evolved and that historical study, not unchanging law, should guide its future. He saw the essence of the faith in monotheism and ethics. Samuel Holdheim pushed further, treating many traditional legal rules, including parts of marriage and divorce law, as obsolete once Jews lived under modern civil codes. Rabbinical conferences in Brunswick in 1844, Frankfurt in 1845, and Breslau in 1846 gave these ideas a more organized form and showed that Reform was becoming a distinct movement. The movement found its strongest institutional home in the United States. Early American experiments appeared in Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1820s. Large numbers of German speaking Jews arrived in the mid nineteenth century. Isaac Mayer Wise, who reached America in 1846, became the central organizer. He published the prayer book Minhag America, helped create the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873, founded Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1875 to train rabbis for the American setting, and later established the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Classical Reform received its clearest statement in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. The platform declared that Jews form a religious community rather than a nation. It rejected any expectation of a return to Palestine. It accepted as binding only the moral laws of the Mosaic legislation and discarded rituals, including dietary laws, that reformers judged incompatible with modern civilization. It stressed ethical monotheism, social justice, and harmony with science. The twentieth century brought revision. The rise of antisemitism in Europe and the mass arrival of Eastern European Jews changed American Jewish life. In 1937 the Columbus Platform reaffirmed progressive principles while recognizing Jewish peoplehood and supporting the building of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Later platforms continued to balance universal ethics with renewed attention to Hebrew, traditional practices, and particular Jewish identity. Today Reform Judaism is the largest denomination among affiliated American Jews. Its institutions support hundreds of congregations, rabbinic training, youth education, and social action. The movement’s history remains one of continuous adaptation: an effort to keep Judaism intellectually coherent and practically viable for Jews who live fully inside modern societies. Israel Jacobson left, Abraham Geiger right. Temple Emmanuel NYC, a Reform Siddur. (prayer book). Curious about Jewish history. Follow today.

Who was Shmuel Hanagid? Samuel ha-Nagid (Shmuel ibn Naghrillah, 993–1056) was one of the most extraordinary figures of the Spanish Golden Age. Born in Córdoba, he rose from a merchant’s son and shopkeeper to become grand vizier and military commander of the Muslim taifa of Granada under the Zirid Berber rulers Habbus and Badis. For nearly two decades he led Muslim armies into battle against Seville, Almería, and other rivals while simultaneously serving as nagid (leader) of Spanish Jewry. He wrote Hebrew war poetry from the field, composed biblical commentaries and Hebrew grammar works, patronized scholars across the Jewish world (from Spain to the Babylonian academies and Jerusalem), and rebuilt Jewish cultural life in Granada after the fall of Córdoba. His career marked the absolute high point of Jewish political and cultural power in medieval Muslim Spain. Ten years after his death, his son Joseph was killed in the 1066 Granada massacre that ended the family’s influence. A Jewish statesman, general, and poet who commanded Muslim armies and wrote Hebrew verse about the battles. The Golden Age at its most dramatic. Curious about more Jewish history?
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