On Saturday, when professors, students and families streamed into Cincinnati’s Plum Street Temple to celebrate the ordination of a new class of rabbis from Hebrew Union College’s Cincinnati seminary, it was for the final time.

Established in 1875 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of American Reform Judaism, the HUC Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati was the first of its kind in America.

“What is the Torah of Cincinnati?” Rabbi Meredith Kahan, who graduated from the school in 2013 and serves as senior rabbi at Cincinnati’s Bene Israel Rockdale Temple, said in the ordination sermon to an audience of hundreds. “Not one building, one professor, one curriculum, one generation, nor one era… Reform Judaism strives to differentiate the essence from the form. This, then, is the essence of the Torah of Cincinnati. The Torah of Cincinnati is innovative and rooted. It’s creative and it’s authentic. It cherishes tradition while recognizing the importance of transformation.”

Participating in the ceremony were leaders from the Reform world, including Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, and Karen Sim, president of Women of Reform Judaism.

The Cincinnati residential rabbinical program is shuttering, along with its degree-granting programs including a doctorate and masters program of philosophy in Judaic, Hebrew and Cognate Studies. Financial troubles and falling enrollment have led to cuts in HUC’s New York and Los Angeles-based programs, too. This final year, the Cincinnati school ordained four rabbis.

“The poignancy of this moment… must not preempt the celebration that we are here to commemorate, the celebration of our students today,” Andrew Rehfeld, the school’s president, said at the ordination. “For our tradition teaches that joy must take precedence over sorrow, whether a funeral procession in deference to a wedding or shiva in deference to this joy of Shabbat.”

Rehfeld always gets “caught up in the moment at this time of year,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy in an interview the two days before the ceremony. “You have the culmination of hard work, hard study. You have the launching of a new set of rabbis out into the world to do the work that we were designed to do — to apply Jewish wisdom into Jewish life and repair the world.”

But the celebration is “bittersweet,” he said, for him, the students and the staff who are losing their jobs. Additionally, the closing — and a recent lawsuit filed by the Ohio attorney general’s office to stop it — is taking away attention from those who deserve it, he said: the students graduating.

“It’s a poignant moment,” Rehfeld said. “You have a 150-year-old program that has meant so much to so many and has done such important work, bringing modern Reform Judaism to our world, transforming the way we think and practice Judaism. And when you have major shifts like [the program closing], it’s unsettling. There’s a sadness to it. There’s a poignancy. This is a beautiful campus, the physicality of it, and there’s a heaviness.”

The Cincinnati campus has been downsizing for decades, he said. In 2012, the school renovated a floor in its gymnasium, filling in a pool to create office space and a food pantry for use by Jewish Family Service of Cincinnati, and in February 2025, the school rented a classroom building to Good Samaritan Hospital for its nursing school. “We’ve been looking for places that we can support communities while stewarding our resources responsibly.”

The morale on campus “is not great,” Rehfeld admitted. “What keeps our staff and our faculty sustained is the work of our students, is the work of the research, is the work of people coming to use our facilities… I really feel for our staff. I am particularly grateful to our faculty who have shown up every single day to support the students despite how difficult this is for them… They’ve been able to put our students first and our mission first.”

A recent lawsuit, filed in mid-April by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost to block the institution’s plans to shutter the rabbinic program, has only worsened the situation, Rehfeld said. “What the attorney general has done is outrageous. There’s no basis to it. It’s an interference in our work as a religious organization.”

After the board voted to shutter the program in April 2022, the school shared plans with the attorney general’s office, turning over extensive documents. “They’ve had all the materials they need if they have a question or they believe something was inappropriately done,” he said. “Any point in time, they could have taken action and could have stopped [it] if they thought it was wrong.”

Filing a lawsuit weeks before the final graduation “is offensive,” Rehfeld said. “It’s obnoxious, it is undermining the focus on our students.”

Yost previously sued the school in 2024 about concerns that the school was seeking to sell rare religious texts from the school’s five-story library, something HUC denies. HUC settled in October 2025, never selling any books and agreeing to notify the office 45 days before attempting any sales. The book lawsuit halted plans the school had in 2024, including hiring of an executive director for the HUC’s research center, Rehfeld said, and this new lawsuit is similarly disrupting the HUC from moving forward.

“These lawsuits have consequences to our ability to deliver on a vision,” he said. “We only got out from under the first lawsuit last fall, and it takes time to restart things. And now we’re under another one, so we have to build back confidence and trust, and having a lawsuit without basis does not do that.”

While the in-person rabbinic school is closing, the school’s virtual program, which was launched in January 2025 is thriving, Rehfeld said, and the campus, which includes the 650,000-volume Klau Library and the American Jewish Archives, containing 15 million pages of documents, recordings, microfilm and photographic images, will continue to be used.

The online program is designed for second-career students, a trend in the rabbinic world as evidenced by a 2025 Atra – Center for Rabbinic Innovations study that showed that 66% of current rabbinical students are entering the field after leaving another. The Atra study also showcased another shift, the rise of the non-denominational seminary, and a new player is already preparing to take advantage of the HUC Cincinnati campus. Although the HUC’s online program meets predominantly virtually, students make use of the Cincinnati campus during regular in-person intensive visits.

Rehfeld hopes that the campus becomes a destination for all Reform congregations, where they can explore the archives, peruse the library, study and explore the founding city of the movement that “drove the ideas of the American Jewish experience.” His vision is to have each of the 800 congregations affiliated with the movement visit at least once a decade — 80 groups per year. 

“It does take investment, does take a willingness of people to see a future beyond what used to be,” he said. “And I believe that can come with time.”

He also hopes to see the archives continue to grow, “but that growth and expansion will take collaboration of the local community and a willingness to see us as partners. And right now, I understand the community is in a period of pain and sense of loss,” he said.

Still, HUC is moving forward. Later this month, it will announce a new cohort of AJA fellows, nearly two dozen teachers, students and scholars to make use of the campus.

The seminary has made changes before, adding the New York and California campuses in the 1950s and 1960s, merging with the rival Reform Jewish Institute of Religion, adding programs, such as one promoting democracy in Jerusalem, and shuttering others, including a department of human relations in Cincinnati and a school of education in New York.

“Campuses are where universities do the work they do; they’re not the work they do,” Rehfeld said, comparing the HUC to Kodak, the photography company that revolutionized the industry. The difference between HUC and Kodak, he said, is that when digital cameras emerged, Kodak remained focused on film, instead of focusing on being the best in photography. Because of this, Rehfeld said, Kodac went bankrupt in 2012, emerging as a much smaller business. HUC isn’t grasping onto film; it’s zeroed in on being the best in photography, however it’s being done.. 

Cincinnati will always be the “spiritual home” of HUC, Rehfeld said. “HUC’s purpose has not changed since 1875. We train transformative Jewish leaders, rabbis, cantors, educators, nonprofit managers, but the form that we use to train them has changed, and in dynamic responsiveness to our times.”

On Wednesday, July 11, 1883, the Hebrew Union College celebrated its first ordination at the Plum Street Temple – that of four rabbis. The moment reshaped denominational Judaism, pushing the creation of Conservative Judaism. Nearly 143-years later, after this year’s ordination ended, the pews emptied as a choir sang… and four new rabbis took their first steps into a rapidly changing world.