February 4, 2006

Religion Journal

Reform Jews Examining Ways to Retain Their Young Men

Correction Appended

There was a new option among the dozen kinds of worship services available last winter at the biennial convention of the North American Federation of Temple Youth, which attracted about 1,400 young Reform Jews to Los Angeles.

As always at the conventions, there were lots of choices: one service was totally in Hebrew, for example, another used meditation and another was tailored to gay men and lesbians.

But one service, offered for the first time, seemed a throwback to a different time. It was for men only.

Male-only services could be considered a paradox in the Reform movement, a denomination established in the United States in the 1870's with sexual equality at its core. It broke from tradition by introducing mixed seating, bringing women down from balconies and from behind the partitions that had separated the sexes in synagogue sanctuaries.

The Reform movement, now American Judaism's largest denomination, with some 1.5 million members, was also the first to ordain women as rabbis, in 1972.

But it is losing its young men.

That is enough of a concern that the Reform movement's major organizations recently formed a commission to study the matter, and the director of admissions at the movement's rabbinical seminary is leading the panel.

The class of 39 people that began rabbinical studies at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion last fall has twice as many women as men. Still, of 1,888 members of the Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis, only 432 are women.

Rabbi Michael Friedman, director of junior and senior high school programs at the Union for Reform Judaism, which serves its congregations, recently surveyed all of the movement's youth group, leadership training, camping and Israel programs for teenagers and young adults.

Attendance records since 2003 showed that girls accounted for 57 percent to 78 percent of participants in each activity.

Rabbi Friedman said there had been a major cultural change in the past 25 years.

"The change has been not only who the leaders are but also in their leadership style," he said. "Before, it was always a man high up on a bimah wearing a big robe in a deep voice, a model of leadership that was male-only and top-down."

"With growing egalitarianism, which I totally support, we've seen a major cultural change," Rabbi Friedman said. "Those synagogues now have everybody sitting in a circle with someone playing a guitar sharing feelings. It's much more participatory. These are all good things, but they are styles that women may be more comfortable with than men.

"I don't think boys have a problem with it, but they don't necessarily see themselves there."

Peter LaRosa is one of those boys. A 16-year-old 11th grader in Brooklyn, he attended Hebrew school at a Reform temple, starting in third grade. But the day after his bar mitzvah, "he announced he was never setting foot in temple again," said his mother, Susan LaRosa. "He's kept to his word."

A lot of his friends continued going to the synagogue, Peter said, but "I decided to focus more on baseball and snowboarding than Judaism."

Like many other young people in the Reform movement today, Peter has one Jewish parent and one Christian. Each year his family celebrates both Christmas and Hanukkah, and Peter said he felt that "we're never fully Jewish," adding, "I never understand things at temple, so it didn't strike me as an interesting place to keep going."

Interfaith families account for a significant minority of members in some Reform synagogues and a majority of them in others. Those numbers amplify the challenges congregations face in reaching adolescent boys and young men, which are rooted in a complex set of issues, one expert said.

In liberal Judaism, "we have to find something that relates to the reality of what boys go through," said William Pollock, a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the author of "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood."

"They are struggling with who they are, with what masculinity means and what being a Jewish male means in American society," Mr. Pollock said.

"The denominational youth movements haven't tapped into things from that gendered perspective," said Mr. Pollock, who has been hired by an independent feminist Jewish organization, Moving Traditions, to explore the issue.

The problem does not seem to exist in Orthodoxy, whose public religious rituals are led exclusively by men, which allows boys to see an obvious place for themselves.

In 2002, Moving Traditions started a program of monthly celebrations for teenage girls called "Rosh Hodesh: It's a Girl Thing!" There are now 175 Rosh Hodesh groups around the country, whose activities are intended to foster self-esteem and Jewish identity.

"Many of us, because of the women's movement, had a sense of what girls want and need," said Deborah Meyer, executive director of Moving Traditions. "Ironically, now there's less known about adolescent boys. We wonder what do guys want?"

"We get asked all the time by our partner organizations with Rosh Hodesh groups for something for boys," Ms. Meyer said. "It's really an unmet need."

Moving Traditions recently started its own study of boys' needs and may develop some regular activity with both social and religious components just for them.

The Reform movement's initiative is approaching the problem in several ways. It is coming up with programming suggestions for its congregations to use at what it identified as six major entry points in synagogue life, including Hebrew school, bar mitzvah and holidays.

It also plans to help congregational educators learn how to distinguish between girls' learning needs and boys', and how to help the boys, Rabbi Friedman said. The initiative will also recommend that synagogues create mentoring programs pairing teenagers with boys preparing for their bar mitzvahs.

More male-only worship services may also be held in Reform settings, he said.

"We can't have a healthy, vibrant Reform Jewish community without men or without women," Rabbi Friedman said. "This is not about pushing women out and men retaking the high ground, but about creating space" for boys and young men.

When that happens it is a powerful thing, said Andrew Shoenig, who attended the men-only service at the Temple Youth convention.

"It was packed," said Mr. Shoenig, a freshman at Emory University and president of the youth group, which has about 10,000 members.

In ordinary services, "guys may not sing or chant as loudly" as girls do, he said. "The guys are just sitting there in many cases. So when we stuck 40 or 50 guys in a room, how was it that we became the loudest service there? The room was bursting with testosterone and energy."

"Maybe it's because guys didn't have to sing up an octave with a female song leader," Mr. Shoenig said. The setting "allowed us to just be comfortable and not have to worry about anything on the outside."

Correction: Feb. 10, 2006

The Religion Journal column on Saturday, about efforts by the Reform movement of American Judaism to encourage participation by young men, misstated the origin of a program called "Rosh Hodesh: It's a Girl Thing," which promotes self-esteem and Jewish identity among teenage girls. It was founded by Kolot, the Center for Jewish Women's and Gender Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and spun off to the independent feminist organization Moving Traditions. It was not started by Moving Traditions.