Christopher Wagner, a judge on the Hamilton County, Ohio Court of Common Pleas, rejected a June 11 motion to dismiss by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and ruled on Oct. 29 that the state attorney general’s case can proceed against the HUC, the academic arm of Reform Judaism.
HUC sought to nix a May 28 attempt by the newly formed College for Contemporary Judaism to intervene in the state’s effort to take over the Cincinnati campus of HUC. That campus, according to the HUC website, has been the “historic birthplace of Hebrew Union College” since 1875, when Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise founded American Reform Judaism.
“The Cincinnati campus is a vital center of learning, scholarship and community engagement,” HUC states. “The campus is home to unparalleled research and cultural resources including the internationally renowned collections of the Klau Library, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and the Skirball Museum.” The campus is also “located close to the geographic center of America,” HUC says. “We are in the heartland.”
In 2022, the HUC board voted to remove a line from a 1950 agreement, which combined Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College with New York’s Jewish Institute of Religion. It said that it would “permanently maintain rabbinical schools” in both locations.
That same year, the board in New York voted to wind down rabbinical ordinations in Cincinnati, and the college announced plans to consolidate its three U.S. campuses into a national school, operating on two residential campuses, “while also reimagining our historic Cincinnati campus to ensure our world-class library, archives and museum serve students, scholars and community learners in new and innovative ways.”
The Ohio attorney general sued to try to make HUC maintain the campus in keeping with what it said are the school’s donation agreements. “Hebrew Union accepted millions of dollars in donations based on a 76-year-old promise it now would like to break,” Dave Yost, then the state attorney general, said earlier this year. “We’re suing to keep these assets in Cincinnati where they belong.”
The state sought to take control of the campus and redistribute its assets in order to keep a permanent rabbinical school in Ohio, which it said was a precondition of some of the donations. That case has continued under Andy Wilson, Ohio’s current attorney general. (JNS sought comment from HUC and from the Union for Reform Judaism, which declined to comment.)
The judge ruled on Oct. 29 that HUC’s allegations, that the state was meddling in religious decisions about how to train rabbis in violation of the Constitution, are “premature” at this “early stage of litigation.”
“Although HUC argued that the decision to close the rabbinical school was ‘purely ecclesiastical,’ the allegations of the complaint do not indicate that the attorney general brought this case purely because of the decision to close the rabbinical school,” the judge wrote.
The judge also said that the attorney general will have to prove that donors wouldn’t have been philanthropic in this case if they hadn’t been assured of a “permanent” rabbinical school in Cincinnati and that “the court has concerns about an obligation in perpetuity.”
“However these issues are not properly resolved in a motion to dismiss,” he wrote.
The College for Contemporary Judaism, a new Cincinnati-based entity founded by former HUC employees of Hebrew Union College, plans to create a liberal rabbinical school. It is asking Ohio to allow it to take over the 12-acred HUC campus.
On Oct. 5, the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas granted CCJ’s motion to intervene in that lawsuit.
Andrew Berger, who is of counsel at Katz Teller, a Cincinnati law firm, was a member of the Hebrew Union College board and is a former chair of the college. He is now an attorney for the College for Contemporary Judaism, of which he is founding board chair.
“The attorney general is making a claim on behalf of the people and the donors, but they can’t run a rabbinical seminary,” Berger told JNS prior to the Oct. 29 ruling.
His client’s new role in the suit would be to take part in any mediation and to lay claim to assets that may be awarded to the state, he told JNS.
“Today’s ruling confirms that the promises made to generations of donors deserve a full hearing,” Berger stated on Oct. 30.
“The court was right to deny HUC’s motion to dismiss, and we are hopeful it can lead to a mutually agreeable resolution during mediation, which the court requested,” he said. “Our belief is simple: that charitable gifts made for the purpose of educating rabbis in Cincinnati, for the ultimate benefit of America’s heartland, continue to serve that purpose.”
“Our work does not wait on the courtroom,” stated Rabbi Gary Zola, founding president of the College for Contemporary Judaism.
If the College for Contemporary Judaism does receive the HUC assets, it could presumably inherit many of the problems that plagued HUC.
“There’s going to have to be fundraising. Obviously, every Jewish institution does that, and that will be an ongoing effort,” Rabbi Gary Zola, founding president of the College for Contemporary Judaism, told JNS before the Oct. 29 ruling.
“I’m personally convinced that if the case is successful, if we’re able to come to a successful resolution of this matter, that will be what you might call the soil out of which CCJ will grow,” he told JNS.
Zola told JNS that the College for Contemporary Judaism released a study on Oct. 22 of the experiences of nearly 800 non-Orthodox Jewish congregations across the Midwest, South and Mountain West regions with rabbinic hires. About half of the 800 responded to the survey.
Among those that responded, nearly three-quarters said they received too few qualified applicants for rabbinical posts, and 38% said that meant three or fewer applicants. More than three-quarters said that their location deterred candidates from applying.
“The Jewish future of this continent will be written in Memphis and Des Moines as surely as in New York and Los Angeles, and CCJ exists to make sure those communities have the rabbis to lead them,” Zola stated on Oct. 30.
He told JNS prior to the Oct. 29 decision that “we will, of course, need to continue to build support, but I’m convinced that the people in the middle of the country will do just that.”
“The people in the middle of the country are up in arms about the dearth of rabbis,” he said. “They are hopping mad about being abandoned by the coasts, and I think they’ll support this institution.”
“This is the only liberal rabbinical seminary that has resources between the coasts, and that’s another very unique feature I don’t want to lose sight of,” he said.
The survey asked congregations what rabbinic applicants lacked. More than half said executive leadership, 45% said people skills and 43% said community-building. Pastoral, ritual or Hebrew skills were further down on their lists.
The study suggests that 39% of rabbis applying to Reform congregations since 2020 came from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and 26% of rabbis who applied to all congregations in the survey were ordained at HUC. Of all the congregations in the survey, 65% of Reform ones and 44% of all congregations, received at least one application from a graduate of the HUC campus in Cincinnati.
Zola, who was ordained at HUC in Cincinnati and worked in recruitment there for 16 years, led the American Jewish Archives on the same campus, helping build it into the world’s largest free-standing research center dedicated solely to the study of the American Jewish experience, he said. He also taught at HUC.
The HUC Cincinnati campus “today exists without students, without faculty, without any life,” he told JNS.
“I was keenly aware, and I think everybody was, of the growing crisis in attracting prospective students to rabbinic education, particularly in the liberal denomination,” Zola said. “Knowing that whole realm the way I do, and having the career that I’ve had, I just could not see abandoning the entire middle of the country, where 40% of American Jews live.”
In ‘community,’ in person
JNS asked the rabbi how the College for Contemporary Judaism might succeed where other seminaries, like HUC, are failing.
Zola told JNS that the school will teach in person, while some others have maintained online education even after the Covid pandemic.
“If you wanted to pay a handsome sum to some organization, you could, in two years, without ever leaving wherever you lived, earn a title of ‘rabbi,’” he said. “There are at least six different online institutions that are doing that now.”
“I don’t see how it would be possible to provide an adequate education,” he said, of the way those institutions are structured.
“The first thing that CCJ is committed to is we intend to be an in-person program,” Zola told JNS. “We believe in that. I don’t know how rabbis can hope to build community and to foster community if they don’t study in community.”
His research has found that “there’s no disinterest at all among the most committed liberal Jews in learned, scholarly, capable rabbis who know the text and know the tradition,” he said. “That’s not waning.”
The College for Contemporary Judaism aims to bring “people back into communication with one another, not just sitting at home, online, watching a program, or listening to a lecture, and not going to services, not being with the community,” he said.
CCJ will have what Zola called a unique curriculum with three years of continuous learning followed by a fourth year “completely devoted to practice-based learning with full-time placement in a liberal congregation.” He called the latter a “rabbinic residency” that will include shadowing senior rabbis in communal events.
‘Original sin in the Middle East’
The College for Contemporary Judaism will also be Zionist, Zola told JNS. One of the principles stated on the CCJ website is “an unwavering commitment to the existence and well-being of the Jewish and democratic State of Israel and to the centrality of Jewish peoplehood across time and geography.”
HUC states on its website, under the title “ahavat Israel,” Hebrew for “love for Israel,” that it “is the academic leader in making the Israel experience an integral part of Jewish professional and academic training, fostering a deeper sense of identity and mutual responsibility as part of a global people.”
Of its Jerusalem campus, HUC states that Jerusalem is “the eternal capital of the global Jewish people” and that there, HUC students “deepen their sense of ahavat Yisrael (love of Israel) and mutual responsibility, finding their place in the narrative of the global Jewish people as future leaders of communities in North America, Israel and beyond.”
Zola told JNS that College for Contemporary Judaism plans to help its students “be honest brokers” when it comes to Israel.
“As a historian, I just don’t myself understand how anybody could look at diaspora history for 2,000 years and say, ‘Well, we will do just fine in the diaspora. We don’t need to have our own state,’” he said.
“CCJ plans to be a place where we want to provide students with the ability to offer support, strength, encouragement to not only our diaspora community but also for the idea of the Jewish state in the Middle East,” he told JNS.
“If students coming to us are of the opinion that the original sin in the Middle East was the creation of the State of Israel, they probably won’t be happy at CCJ,” he said.
The College for Contemporary Judaism will welcome free expression and a wide range of ideas, but it “is going to be openly committed to helping people who are religious leaders in the liberal community understand the importance of Jewish life throughout the diaspora and the absolutely intractable significance of the Jewish state, the State of Israel,” he told JNS.
