Instead, they simply proceeded as if they were a Sanhedrin, had the power to legislate, and did so in a far broader manner than any rabbinic assembly of the Middle Ages. This pattern has continued in the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructioinist movements. Changes may have been defended halakhically, but they were made within the framework of the right to reinterpret or radically change older Jewish assumptions, both biblical and rabbinic. This has been the pattern of each of these movements for
the last two centuries.
This pattern was adopted even more readily in North America . Statements similar to those in Germany were made later at the Rabbinic Conference in Philadelphia in 1869, though it was less conciliatory; they added nothing new and merely clarified matters.” The American rabbis were in the fortunate position of serving Reform communities, not congregations in which there were Orthodox minorities as in Central Europe , so they could make decisions much more readily. The last great rabbinic conference before the founding of the Central Conference of American Rabbis was held in 1885 in Pittsburgh . Kaufmann Kohler ’s(1843-1926) message to the Conference, among other matters, praised women for their charitable and educational efforts and then continued:
[ do not hesitate to claim for myself the priority of the claim for woman's full admission into the membership of the Jevish Congregation. Reform Judaism has pulled down the screen from the gallery behind which alone the Jewish woman of old was allowed to take part in divine service. Reform Judaism has denounced as an abuse the old Hebrew benediction:‘Blessed be God who has not made me a woman,” borrowed from Plato , who, notwithstanding his soul's lofty flights in the highest realm of thought, never realized the high dignity of woman as the co-partner and helpmate of man. Reform Judaism will never reach its higher goal without having first accorded to the congregational council and in the entire religious and moral sphere of life, equal voice to woman with man.
The Conference issued a series of sweeping theological statements that went much farther and were conceived in a much broader manner than those of any earlier conference. Although it