Religion: The Disappearing Jews

Since the Nazi Holocaust, which wiped out one-third of the world's Jews, "Jewish survival" has been a slogan that encompasses a number of issues. Besides support for Israel and Soviet Jewry, the concept includes attempts to counteract losses through secularization and intermarriage of Jews with Gentiles. Another, and some say the greatest threat to Jewish survival is being increasingly talked about: the trend among modern Jews to have small families. In the U.S., for example, enrollment in synagogue classes and day schools has declined by roughly one-fourth since 1965, owing largely to the falling Jewish birth rate.

At this spring's meeting of the Conservative rabbinate, a study was presented that advocated "immediate reconsideration of attitudes toward family size" and asked rabbis to promote bigger families in their synagogues. The liberal Reform branch is less worried about birth rates than the Conservative, but its national rabbinical conference last month also expressed concern over Jewish population trends and authorized a study of the issue.

Revering Z.P.G. "The statistics only really began to hit us in the past few years," says New York City Conservative Rabbi William Berman, who a year ago organized the Jewish Population Regeneration Union to promote a reversal. Zero population growth may be a good idea for humanity in general, he believes, but "it's not a service to humanity for Jews to disappear." Since Jews constitute only three-tenths of 1% of the world's population of 4 billion, Sol Roth, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, reasons that "the Jewish community will not solve the world's problems by applying Z.P.G. to itself."

Orthodox Rabbi Norman Lamm, who raised the question in a recent speech in Milwaukee, admits that world population control is a "moral imperative," but maintains that it must be balanced by a concern for survival of all human groups. "Jews are a disappearing species," he says, "and should be treated no worse than the kangaroo and the bald eagle." Lamm's recommendation: each Jewish couple should have four or five children.