Reform Responsa- 59 ­

the: Conference, however, was another matter. Through the late twenties, and all of the thirties and forties, the publication of responsa in the Yearbook was spotty at best. In some years the Committee had no recorded report at all. At other times its report consisted of little more than an announcement that only a few questions had arrived and had been answered directly by the chair. Only every‘two or three years, on the average, did the committee feel it worthwhile to publish one or more of its responsa as being of more general interest. So the Committee continued to exist, to be led by prestigious scholars, but to be something of a sideshow.

Even a cursory look through the Tables of Contents of the Yearbooks reveals that a change wa starting to take form in the early fifties. One harbinger of this was the commission given to the committee in 1950 to bear primary responsibility for drafting a paper which would express the Conference’s support a bill in the New York state assembly that would legalize euthanasia in certain cases. The lengthy result, published in the Yearbook for 1950, thrust the Committee into a prominence it had never had before.(34) In fact, it had published hardly anything for the last decade. The clouds of change gathered even more ominously by 1952, when the Yearbook published two responsa(the last time that happened was 1941), the first of which contained two answers, the one by Alexander Guttmann being a model of classical rabbinic scholarship complete with the citation of sources in Hebrew . The storm burst in 1953, with five responsa published, and thereafter there was a steady and unbroken drizzle of reponsa(if I may belabor the metaphor just a bit). From 1952 on, then, responsa are a fixture in the Yearbook.