The unfolding story of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America bears, in its varied facets, a potent message: the strength of Torah-committed purpose. When, on 18 Iyyar 5658/June 8, 1898, the establishment of this "strong union" took place, it was because the participants were moved by that purpose. They were the delegated representatives of forty-seven¹ congregations in eleven states, Washington, D.C., and Canada's Montreal. Actually, they spoke and acted for many times their number, for, in essence, and, to an extent, in practical fact, they represented the broad ranks of the Torah-loyal as a collectivity, the American Torah community. The spirit of that historic occasion, the resolve to advance in common endeavor, has endured. It has persisted amid unceasing challenge through the near-century since.

Such a century! A century of utmost testing of the Jew and of Jewish meaning. A century of confusion, agony, searching, and rebirth for the Jewish people . . . a century of epochal world change and transformation of human life . . . a century of universal conflict . . . a century of undeviating devotion to the task for which this Union was brought into being.

In itself, the birth of the Orthodox Union, as it is popularly called, bears historical significance. Considering the circumstances of the time of its birth, however, the fact of its launching is the more remarkable. And, considering all the circumstances since, the Union's persistence in its living course and the rise to its present status are even more extraordinary.

Up to the new beginning, cohesive endeavor in the common interest had been an elusive goal among the formless ranks of the traditional among America's Jews. Each year, thousands more hard-pressed immigrants added a new stratum of uncertainty and bewilderment to the spiritual confusion besetting new and preceding arrivals and their established fellow Jews alike. The transition from Old World to New World exacted a heavy toll from all.

Each wave of newcomers, coming from lands where the Torah-rooted life of old was shaken by oppression and the inroads of New-Age influence, strained for a toehold on the strangeness of America. The sweatshop or the pushcart was the route to a better life. As the Prehistory to this book has shown, the urge to provide for religious basics had borne fruit in innumerable sites of places to davven and to leven, and of lantsmanshaften fellowship and mutual aid. But there was a tragic void of coordination or overarching organization. In the absence, of qualified guidance, central direction, or established authority, the traditional religious scene was one of fragmented chaos. The channels of religious need were open to exploitation by anyone, with or without ecclesiastical qualification.

Thus, as the contemporary accounts quoted in the Prehistory so graphically show, private interest held sway in means of observance of religious sanctities in everyday living, a hodgepodge of self-determined personal vestment. Shechitah and kashruth, the laws pertaining to animal slaughter and food requirements generally, were particularly exposed, the most conspicuous stains on a much-blotted picture. The conscienceless depredations of charlatans and scoundrels befouled these crucial facets of the religious heritage.

Surely not the least of the unmet dangers was the devastation among the young generation. Not only literally but in outlook, parents and children thought and spoke in different languages. Between the Old-Country-reared parents and their offspring born or reared in the new land lay a gap that, for some, was an unbridged chasm. Jewish education was on the crudest level; means of transmission of the Jewish heritage geared to American conditions were thought of by few. Calamitous losses loomed.

Together with critical internal problems was the collective defenselessness and voicelessness of the religious faithful. The bearer of authentic Jewish belief was inarticulate amid the spiritual confusion of the Jews spread across America; lacking a channel of joint expression, his Torahderived message was neither formed nor heard. The spurious and the misbegotten flourished weedlike in the environs of Jewish America; pseudoJudaism and flight from Jewishness alike siphoned away faith and heritage.

One after another, attempts to get to the root of the problem by concerned group-to-group effort among Torah-loyal circles had been projected. Each in its turn, climaxed by the memorable debacle of the Chief Rabbinate undertaking, had foundered. To put forth yet another such attempt in the face of all that had transpired took more than good intentions; if this venture was not to be battered down by seemingly intractable realities as previous carefully framed plans had been, some special element had to be brought to bear. In this case, a special factor was at the heart of the enterprise. It was the person and personality of Henry Pereira Mendes.

Remarkable, then, was the fact that through this key figure in the American Jewish story, Orthodox Jewry in America gained a unifying instrument that came into firm being-firm, because the guiding hand of the convenor, Mendes, weighed in the balance against all that might have caused it to be stillborn or short-lived. The same was true in succeeding years. Remarkable always was the persistence in the organization's course, despite the tenuousness of its relationship to its constituency, and despite the attrition of addressing great needs with small means. Year after year, decade after decade, through a century-long epoch of climactic challenge to Jewish life, the work set in motion by Dr. Mendes, lastingly permeated by his spirit, had proven vital.

THE MENDES PERSONALITY AND PURPOSE

In the November-December 1937 issue of a former publication, The Orthodox Union, an article by Dr. David deSola Pool, "The Influence of Dr. Mendes on Orthodox Judaism in America," read, in part:

To measure the significance of the life, work, and character of Henry Pereira Mendes one must look back in history. In 1877, when Dr. Mendes arrived in the United States from England, the burning issue in American Jewish fife was the violently waged struggle between Reform and Orthodoxy. Reform seemed to be sweeping everything before it. More and more the rich and socially prominent Jews were flocking into Reform. Synagogues that had been in existence for some time were becoming Reform in order to proclaim their American character. Orthodoxy was being labelled as foreign and un-American, and 'American Judaism" was to be the title by which Reform designated itself.

Dr. Mendes came from an English background. He spoke English with a vigor and chasteness that were altogether beyond the German English of the leaders of Reform at that time. In his personality he exemplified the complete congruity of Orthodox Judaism and the Anglo-American cultural tradition. As the religious head of the oldest Jewish congregation in the country, with its American tradition going back through Revolutionary and Colonial days to the Dutch period in New York, he symbolized historical American Judaism as could no other man in the United States. In his person he took away all support from the clamorous assertion that Orthodox Judaism was unAmerican and that Reform was American Judaism. He made it clear that the term "American Judaism" had only one correct meaning, and that was Orthodox Judaism.

But not only polemically was Dr. Mendes a unique influence in this respect. In a more positive way his influence and example slowly filtered through to raise the standard. of dignity in many an Orthodox congregation in the United States. His personal dignity and deep sense of reverence for the synagogue as the House of God were messages which carried silently through his personality as well as eloquently through his words into Orthodox synagogues which were making standards for American Jewish Orthodoxy.

One of the lines of attack which Reform used to make on Orthodoxy with monotonous iteration was an echoing of the ancient attack by Paul on Judaism. Reform would assert that Orthodoxy was a mechanical observance of ritual forms, and a formal carrying out of commands in which the spirit of religion was sacrificed to the letter of the law. To denounce Orthodox Judaism as being a spiritless legalism became an absurdity when faced by Dr. Mendes. In him the letter of the law and its spirit were fused in perfect harmony. In him a faithful adherence to Jewish ritual proscriptions engendered a profound religiosity. He was an exempler of the spiritual beauty of Orthodox Judaism.

Had Dr. Mendes been merely an individual, these qualities, beautiful as they are, would have had limited value as an influence. But Dr. Mendes was the principal organizer of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, and its president during the first sixteen years of the Union's existence. As president of the Union, these qualities became in a measure symbolical of American Jewish Orthodoxy as a whole. It was Dr. Mendes, representing and speaking in the name of Orthodox Jewry, who vindicated for Orthodox Judaism its complete concinnity in American Life.

Demonstration of the concinnity of authentic Judaism in American life was, however, but one of the tasks undertaken by Henry Pereira Mendes. The overriding urgency, to him, was to enable the Jew in America to find himself as a true Jew in spirit and mind, in belief and practice, and to give voice and arm to that Jew. This need had engaged the profound concern. of Mendes from the beginning of his American career, continuing through the rest of his life. Well might Dr. Mendes have confined his ministrations to the concerns of his congregants at Shearith Israel, but, while fully attentive to his official duties, he saw these within an encompassing frame. As has been expressed elsewhere ² :

From the first, Mendes had seen the calamitous threat to American life in the anarchic conditions he found. Among the established communities, uncurbed assimilation and rampant heterodoxy threatened to submerge every loyalty to the ancestral faith and way of fife. Among the increasing masses of new immigrants arriving destitute and demoralized, religious life was in chaos. As spiritual leader of the patrician Shearith Israel, the rock on which American Jewish fife was founded, the young Mendes was placed in a focal position. The direction he set, the note he struck, would have crucial influence.

Mendes rose to the test. In word and action, he called forth fidelity to the Torah way, rallied spirits, turned the light of authentic Jewish teaching on the dilemmas of the time, strove to guide the Jew in America toward the Modem Age and New World challenges while holding fast to his heritage. He reached out to the established and the newly arrived ranks alike. Devoted as Henry Pereira Mendes was to his own congregation, his concern embraced the American Jewish totality.

With clarity, Mendes perceived core needs and set them forth: communal order; recognition of the binding authority of the Halachah, Jewish law, and proper provision for its implementation; the training of a religious leadership attuned to American conditions and equipped to make historical Judaism intelligible to all; a concerted approach to the educational and social needs of the young generation; solidarity within loyalist ranks. He addressed himself to these needs with a determination that disappointments and frustrations could not undo.

Within a few years of Mendes's advent, there transpired that somber page of American Jewish history, the Chief Rabbinate debacle. Within a few years, what many had envisioned as a golden new hope turned out to be a shattering tragedy. Dr. Mendes brought whatever aid he could to the sorely embattled Chief Rabbi Joseph Jacob, standing by him through crushing trials. Nought had availed, however.

Disappointments came, too, with plans Dr. Mendes himself had made. One plan, for a "synod," a Beth Din-tribunal of recognized authorities in halachah, to have countrywide jurisdiction on all religious questions, was promptly shot down by the Reform forces. Another of his dreams, the original Jewish Theological Seminary established as an Orthodox institution for the training of religious leaders and teachers, had been captured after a decade of financial struggle by wealthy magnates, who reestablished it in new character and changed location as the training school of Conservative Judaism. Severing his connection with the converted institution, Dr. Mendes gave no countenance to the Conservative movement. As cited in a report to the 1913 convention of the organization of which he was to be founder, Dr. Mendes categorized the Conservative movement as following in the footsteps of the abhorred Reform: "The word 'Conservative' . . . in its meaning as demonstrated in the history of American Jewry, means gradual but sure alienation from traditional, Orthodox Judaism."