Home Home / Remarks at Meeting of the Council on In…

Speech

August 25, 1992

Remarks at Meeting of the Council on Incentives in Jewish Education (1992)

Jewish Education Orthodoxy & Other Denominations Combating Assimilation
View The Text

This content is currently available in its original PDF format. As we expand the library, we plan to add a text version as well.

RELATED CONTENT

Outline

Lecture at Orthodox Union National Convention (1998)

אני מרגיש טוב – הרב ישראל מאיר לאו: סוף מס' סוכה – טוב לצדיק טוב לשכינו A. Educational Initiatives: * Almost all American Yeshivot, like all of the Israeli, are full-time לימודי קודש with bare minimum of לימודי חול. YU=unique: TuM * ישעי' נד: הרחיבי מקום אהלך... האריכי מיתריך ויתדתיך חזקי... So, can do both! T strengthn th ויתדתיך חזקי, we encourage year in Ir. Wht we expect of ths yr? Greatr depth in learn'g; exp'ce of totl immers'n in Tor; enhancd יר"ש – a bren/passion/sheer delight in ת"ת ומצוות... and incentv t Aliyah: ויאמר ה' אל יעקב שוב אל ארץ אבותיך ולמולדתך ואהיה עמך. ב"ד: אביך מצפה לך. אמך. אני בעצמי...
Torah Umadda Orthodoxy & Other Denominations Combating Assimilation Soviet Jewry

Article

The American Jewish Identity Survey (2001)

I am neither a sociologist nor a demographer, and so cannot adequately evaluate the new and profoundly saddening survey. I will leave it to those who deal with such matters to offer their criticism. But whether or not the figures are correct or incorrect, the general trend of the past years makes the conclusion inevitable: the majority of the Jewish people in this country are abandoning their faith and their folk in alarming numbers. I regard it as tragic that a great and vigorous community has come to such a crisis, with so many Jews forsaking their historic people, a people who have contributed so much to the world, and renouncing their religion which is the fountain of all Western religions and civilization, which has been the bedrock of morality, and which has contributed so much to humanity at large.I am ashamed of the difference between Jews and non-Jews in their professed belief in God. and in the agonizing numbers of those who have opted to join other religious communities. In the past, if an individual apostate announced his intention to convert,his family would go into formal mourning—rending their garments and ,‘sitting shivah”—exactly as one does for a close relative who has died. What shall we do. and how shall we express our grief at the shemad of nearly one and one half million American Jews who have abandoned Judaism in favor of a variety of other faiths? Nothing less than establishing a new day of grief in the Jewish calendar—another Tisha Be av—will do for this mss disaffection. I take no pleasure in offering this “I told you so." I have been involved in the Jewish community for over 50 years, both as pulpit rabbi and as educational administrator— and have never ceased to warn my fellow Jews that their neglect of the Jewish education of their children, both formal (in the school) and informal (in the home) will inevitable lead to a new Holocaust. Now ignorance of the classics of Judaism— the Bible and the Talmud, Jewish history and the Land of Isr…
Jewish Education Combating Assimilation

Correspondence

Exchange with Sanford Altschul about Judaism's Interaction with the Modern World (1966)

Dear Rabbi Lamm, I want to write to you in order to tell you that I deeply admire your religious convictions, your broad range of learning, and your ability to write clearly with much depth. No one more than I appreciates it since I along with you like to base a personal philosophy of life within the framework of Judaism. I have read your reply to the questions posed in Commentary on the August symposium and have also had occasion to read your lecture Why be Orthodox in which particularistic insights like this in common with those who are firm in Tradition and Jewish life are meaningless. In general I am very happy you have taken this stand because nothing but harm and confusion is produced among those who have long since left Orthodoxy or to those Jews in the United States whose perspective of Judaism is one brought anything but learned and committed minded scholars. As a young man of age 26 and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin in Madison in political science along with having a religious background, I have been influenced strongly by such distinguished Orthodox Jewish writers and Jewish leaders by Leo Jung, Studies in Judaism by Solomon Schechter, Man and Judaism by Eliezer Berkovits, Judaism Eternal by Samson Raphael Hirsch, Judaism, Scholasticism and Islam by Louis Ginzburg, Jewish Law and Jewish Life by Pinchas Peli, The Philosophy of Judaism by Samuel Belkin, Reconstructionism, a Critical Appraisal by Eliezer Berkovits, Judaism, A Historical Presentation by Solomon Freehof, A History of the Jewish People by Max Margolis and Alexander Marx. I have a regular subscription for the past ten years to the Jewish Observer newspaper. I usually do not buy or read Commentary except on special occasions. However I find much dignity and honesty in what is expressed. I have wondered whether there were times when both the Orthodox and the Conservative were when Judaism was being trampled under by the numbers from Eastern Europe to the United States. Certainly West…
Modern Orthodoxy Jewish Education Orthodoxy & Other Denominations Combating Assimilation