RABBINIC REFUSAL TO WED INTERFAITH COUPLES CHALLENGED.

Byline: Gustav Niebuhr The New York Times

Jewish leaders have voiced growing concern in recent years over the high rate at which Jews marry non-Jewish partners. Rabbinical organizations, particularly alarmed, warn that such unions threaten the Jewish population's continuity because of the chance that children of interfaith couples will not be reared as Jews.

But Saturday night, the lay leaders of Judaism's largest branch, the liberal Reform movement, will vote on a proposal that, if passed, could deal a blow to organized opposition by Reform rabbis to officiating at interfaith weddings.

In a closed session at a Los Angeles hotel, trustees of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations will consider a resolution asking the rabbis to abandon a 23-year-old statement of such opposition and instead to rely only on their individual consciences in deciding whether to officiate in interfaith unions.

The resolution's author, David Belin, a Des Moines lawyer who serves on the organization's board, says rabbinic officiation at interfaith weddings could actually work in favor of Jewish continuity, since rabbis could encourage the interfaith couples they marry to keep a Jewish household and rear their children as Jews.

But a critic of the resolution, Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, president of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which trains men and women for the Reform rabbinate, says its passage would have consequences even beyond the emotional issue of interfaith marriage: Zimmerman, who maintains that it would be unprecedented for the lay trustees to call on their clergy to abandon a rabbinic position, declares that the resolution's approval would disturb a balance of power between Reform Judaism's laity and its rabbinate.

Despite the rabbinate's organized resistance, as a practical matter, a minority of Reform rabbis have long performed interfaith weddings, although frequently on the condition that children of the union be reared as Jews.

In drafting his resolution, Belin cited a finding from a 1995 national survey, of about 550 interfaith couples by the National Family Opinion Center of Greenwich, Conn., and the Jewish Outreach Institute of New York, that 63 percent of those who had been married by rabbis were rearing their children as Jews.

Belin said he did not regard that finding as evidence of cause and effect. But he added that rabbinic officiation at least carried ``no downside risk'' of alienating an interfaith couple from Judaism, a risk that might be posed, he said, by a rabbi's refusal to officiate.

Like Belin, Egon Mayer, director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, said the finding did not imply a causal connection. ``People who are interested in having a rabbi at their wedding are more interested in being Jews than people who are not interested'' in having a rabbi officiate, Mayer said.

But he added that when rabbis refuse, ``the people they are saying no to are people interested in having Jewish continuity in their lives.''

Mayer said he took no position on Belin's resolution, however.

Belin said he believed that a large majority of Reform Jews supported rabbinic officiation at interfaith weddings in which the couple promise to rear their children as Jews.

He also asserted that the resolution was within the tradition of lay involvement in the most important affairs of the 1.5 million-member movement. ``The ultimate question is who is religion for?'' he said. ``It's for the people.''