Religion: Reform Jewry’s Leader

Reform Jews got a new executive director last week for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. This job, equivalent to the top-paid post in U.S. Protestantism’s Federal Council of Churches, went to slim, youthful-looking Rabbi Nelson Glueck, 41, of Cincinnati.

Only some 500,000 of U.S. Jewry’s 4,770,000 belong to Reform Judaism—but most well-known American Jews are among them. They look on Judaism as a religious rather than as a racial concept. Few of them call their house of prayer a synagogue or go to worship there on Saturday. Instead, they call the synagogue a “temple,” worship on Sunday like Christians, ignore the Mosaic dietary laws.

Dr. Glueck succeeds Rabbi Edward L. Israel of Baltimore, who died of a heart attack last October just before he was to be installed. In a troubled period for Jews everywhere—and especially at a time when Reform Jewry has shown a decided trend toward Orthodoxy and a much greater interest in Jewish history—Dr. Glueck is a good choice. He is an outstanding Biblical archeologist, was the youngest director in history of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, proved the veracity of many a moot Old Testament text by his diggings.