142 Selected Reform Responsa

between Hassidim and Mitnagdim. They not only refused to support each other's institutions, but fought with every weapon at their command including the intervention of the hostile Czarist government (S. Dubnow, Geschichte des Chassidismus, Vol. 2, p. 149 ff). We find a similar situation when we look at the vigorous rising Reform Movement in Germany and Hungary during the last century. In Germany , for example, the Orthodox community fought hard to withhold financial support and to keep the liberal community from obtaining government funds to which all religious communities were entitled. These struggles also led to the secular courts in encounters like the Geiger-Tiktin Affair in which a segment of the community sought to keep the great liberal Jewish scholar , Ludwig Geiger , from the position of rabbi in Breslau (D. Philipson , The Reform Movement in Judaism, pp. 51 ff) When the battle was lost by the Orthodox , they successfully sought legislation in Prussia which would permit a segment of the community to withdraw from the general community and still receive government support. This effort was led by Samson Raphael Hirsch (Ismar Ellbogen, A Century of Jewish Life, p. 99 ff.; W. G. Plaut , The Rise of Reform Judaism, Vol. 1, pp. 63ff,. N. H. Rosenbloom, 7radition in an Age of Reform).

We see similar hostility when we review the history of the Zionist Movement in Europe and America . Certainly antiZionists strongly opposed all financial support for Zionism . The ultra-Orthodox neturei karta , as well as various Hassidic anti-Zionist groups, still deny support and do their best to lobby against it both within the Jewish community and with the United States Congress . We as Reform Jews should not contribute to organizations which advocate a change in the“Law of Return” and should do everything within our power to see to it that others do not contribute to them either. This not only represents enlightened self-interest, but also will help maintain some semblance of unity within the broader- Jewish community. We must remember that it is militant Orthodoxy which