Reform Judaism
A living tradition within Rabbinic Judaism. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Reform Judaism is a living tradition within Rabbinic Judaism. Also written Progressive Judaism, Liberal Judaism (UK usage, with differences), Union for Reform Judaism.
Origin
Founders named in the sources: Israel Jacobson, Abraham Geiger, David Einhorn, Isaac Mayer Wise (United States). No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. NULL: the founding date is genuinely contested across reference works, so no year is chosen (see `dispute`). The Worldmark Encyclopedia of Religious Practices states that Israel Jacobson established the first Reform prayer chapel in 1801 in Westphalia; the Hamburg Temple, opened in 1818, is described as the first permanent Reform congregation with a Reform prayer rite. Rabbinical conferences at Brunswick (1844), Frankfurt (1845) and Breslau (1846) consolidated the movement in Germany. In the United States Isaac Mayer Wise founded Hebrew Union College in 1875 and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in the 1870s; the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, convened by Kaufmann Kohler and chaired by Wise, declared Jews 'no longer a nation, but a religious community'.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Reform Judaism.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-reform-judaism.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-reform-judaism-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Reform Judaism},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-reform-judaism},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.