In a move to reverse a "declining membership trend" inside the Conservative movement, its Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs has hired Lynne Wolfe, a West Orange resident, to help individual synagogues reach out to the intermarried.

In September, Wolfe became the first professional hired by the movement to lead regional training sessions with men's club volunteers under the movement's Keruv program, an eight-year-old effort to cope with growing intermarriage rates.

"The Conservative movement has recognized the seriousness of this issue — that intermarriage is a reality of Jewish life today. They don't sanction it, but this is the way that it is," Wolfe said.

Hiring Wolfe is the latest step in an effort by the Conservative movement to welcome families of intermarrieds while encouraging conversion and the raising of Jewish children.

"She will help us reverse this declining membership trend that had been going on for the last 10 years," said FJMC executive director Rabbi Charles Simon. "No one has ever done this stuff before. Our thinking is so far ahead of the Jewish world in terms of hands-on tools. We are ahead of the curve, and it is a curve that has not gotten this far before."

With the approval of local rabbis, Keruv initiatives are in place in 54 of the more than 700 Conservative congregations in the United States and Canada. Three New Jersey synagogues are taking part.

Peter Gottlieb, president of FJMC's Northern New Jersey Region, is a Keruv consultant at Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston, where 30 to 40 people participate in the program.

"We have been focused largely on congregant families that have experienced intermarriage with their sons and daughters. It involves people from their 40s to their 80s, rather than people in their 20s," he said. "We have not yet developed a program specifically geared toward intermarried families themselves in our congregation."

In its approach to intermarried families, the centrist Conservative movement has often sought a perceived middle ground between the liberal Reform and the traditionalist Orthodox.

But the statistics have made it increasingly difficult for Conservative leaders to appease their own traditionalists and ignore advocates of outreach.

According to Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist of American Jewry, "around 20 percent of the children of Conservatives are marrying non-Jews. The number of non-Orthodox is likely to de

cline significantly in the next 30 to 40 years. This will make it difficult for both Conservative and Reform congregations to recruit members."

Cohen is research professor of Jewish social policy at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion but has close ties to the Conservative movement.

Cohen called the Keruv initiative "a logical response to a significant problem."

Critics within the Conservative movement worry that Keruv represents a retreat from promoting endogamy, or in-marriage, although even many of these critics are satisfied if the programs assert as the ultimate goal conversion of the non-Jewish family member and raising the children of intermarriage as Jews.

"The clergy has to learn how to talk to a changing population," said Simon, "and how to pastor and mentor it, and they don't teach that at the Jewish Theological Seminary or anyplace else."

"Today, nearly everybody has non-Jewish family members, and if they are not in your family or your wife's family, they are in your siblings' families or your first cousins' families," he said. "It is the only way we can grow the Conservative movement. It is too late to say, 'We can only marry endogamously.'"

"It is not my sense that this initiative is being done begrudgingly," said Shuly Schwartz, an associate professor of American-Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship Conservative educational institution in New York. "Intermarriage is a problem everybody faces in the American-Jewish community. We are in a very different place in American-Jewish life. Several generations ago, intermarriage meant a move out of Judaism. It doesn't mean that anymore."

Wolfe will lead regional training sessions with the volunteer Keruv consultants at their individual synagogues.

"I help the men as they are sorting out what is Halacha [Jewish law] and what is custom, separating out what is optional and what can be changed," she said.

"In some Conservative synagogues, a non-Jewish spouse can go up to the bima at their child's bar mitzva and give a speech. It is happening more and more," she said. "Things that were done maybe 15 or so years ago in Reform synagogues are now beginning to take place in Conservative congregations. That's what is so amazing."

From 1991 to 2005, Wolfe directed Pathways, an outreach program for intermarried families affiliated with United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey. During those years she "saw inroads in the Conservative movement, but not like I am seeing today. It is a genuine effort to make their congregations and their homes more welcoming. We are going to create more Jewish families in the Conservative movement."

About synagogues that don't wish to participate in the initiative, Wolfe would say, "They are turning their backs on the family because intermarrieds are us. It is that simple. And there is not going to be a chance that your grandchildren are going to be Jewish if you don't welcome them into your homes and into your synagogues."

Local stories posted courtesy of the New Jersey Jewish News