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anchoring everything in the halakhah so that Adler ’s lengthy essay was published as an appendix. This may also reflect an attempt to include the more traditional rabbis that had not attended the conferences either because of governmental prohibitions or their own hesitation.
This effort to establish a theoretical basis for decisions either before making decisions through a majority vote or alongside it would certainly have been possible, but it was not followed on this occasion and generally discarded both in the Old World and the New World.
The Philadelphia Conference of 1869 followed the pattern of the three earlier German rabbinic meetings. The meeting was organized by David Einhorn (1809-1879) and Samuel Adler , who had also recently immigrated to North America ; it was held in June the same time as the synod in Leipzig . All the participants were Reform rabbis, many of whom had been part of the earlier conferences and were still most at home in the German language which was used for the meetings." The sessions paralleled those of the European meetings, however, they brought more theological discussions and frequent references to the halakhah on marriage, divorce, aguna, halitzah and yibbum. Although halakhic concerns were mentioned, there were few long citations and no major statement such as Adler 's earlier paper. The Atlantic Ocean created a great divide. No one felt any urgency to mount a major defense of innovations since all the rabbis served Reform congregations, not mixed communities as in Germany . The purpose of the meeting was also similar, that is to bring the rabbis of the New World together and to establish a pattern of Jewish life which would be more uniform— something even more necessary in America than in Europe as the new Jewish settlers were still seeking a pattern for their congregations.
The proceedings of the meeting were summarized and the total material was published in German and was therefore generally
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