strengthening the influence of the Hebrew Union College Faculty within the Central Conference. That path may have been also indicated by the fact the first three chairmen were members of the Hebrew Union College faculty and that virtually all the responsa were written be the members of the faculty. However, this was not the road of the future.
The whole notion of issuing responsa through a committee represented an interesting American innovation yet this proved to be a mechanism rarely used. If we look at the committee under Kohler, we will see that the committee began with a full complement of eight members in 1908, but from 1909 to 1912 it consisted of only the chairman and Deutsch or the chairman and Neumark. From 1913 onward the composition varies from four to nine members. In that year Jacob Lauterbach joined the committee, in 1916 Jacob Rappaport and in 1922 Israel Bettan as well as Solomon B Freehof for a two year period. When there was a full committee it did not function as a committee, although there may have been some informal discussion.
The responsa themselves demonstrate a balance between Reform and Tradition. When no change in the Tradition was necessary, it was followed. During the chairmanship of Kohler and Lauterbach there was no effort to move toward Tradition. Even citations were few and the decisions were sometimes made without any traditional sources at all. The chairmen exercised only loose control over the committee and there seems to have been no formal meetings. We can point to no clear patterns for Kohler or Lauterbach ’s decisions; they were overwhelmingly permissive and liberal. Neither chairman was sufficiently interested in responsa to make them central or to write about halakhic theory. Both were willing to open this forum to others who wished to write for the committee; the style may have been different, but the spirit of the decisions remained the same.