In many ways, the Rabbinical Assembly’s convention in Israel resembled the countless solidarity missions that Jewish groups have organized since the Oct. 7 terror attacks, meeting affected communities, speaking with hostage families and learning about nonprofits’ efforts to support and rebuild the country.

But the roughly 250 members of the Conservative movement’s rabbinic arm who came to Israel for last week’s conference — its first held in the Holy Land in 11 years — were primarily focused not on how the country as a whole has been faring in the past 14 months of war but on their Israeli rabbi colleagues, organizers and attendees told eJewishPhilanthropy.

For the Israeli participants, this type of recognition and encouragement was sorely needed after 14 months of supporting their communities, including while often dealing with their own struggles — serving in the reserves or having a spouse or child in the military, being displaced by the fighting or experiencing personal losses. Adding to that the lack of official recognition of their status as rabbis by the Israeli government, “it can be very lonely to be a Masorti rabbi,” Rabbi Maayan Belding-Zidon, director of the Rabbinical Assembly in Israel and director of the Masorti Movement’s religious services Bureau, told eJP.

“To be with colleagues who get it and are excited to see the work we’re doing — it’s really special,” she said, speaking on the sidelines as the convention gathered in Jerusalem’s Schechter Institutes on Tuesday night.

Rabbi Aaron Brusso, the senior rabbi of Bet Torah in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and the treasurer of the Rabbinical Assembly, said the trip to Israel was precisely for that purpose.

“We wanted to come here and show them support. The work they’ve been doing to support their communities from a pastoral perspective has been heroic. So we want to now be there for them,” Brusso said.

“[That means listening] to what it’s been like for them to work — sometimes nonstop — to do that while a spouse is in miluim to do that while a child is in active duty, to do that while their home is under threat of rocket attack,” he said, using the Hebrew word for reserve duty. “It’s hard enough to do this work under normal conditions, but they’ve been doing it under extreme [conditions] for 14 months.”

Rabbi Gesa Ederberg, the vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly and rabbi of the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue in Berlin, told eJP that the connection between Israeli Masorti rabbis and those abroad has been strong since the Oct. 7 attacks.

“One of the most moving things was pretty shortly after Oct. 7, when we got on a Zoom and our Israeli colleagues shared how they were and how they were feeling. One said, ‘I’m not sleeping because I feel like when I’m going to sleep, I leave my husband there on that border and my daughter on the other border,’ And then another colleague said, ‘Go to sleep. I’m awake. And I’ll pray for them.’”

The four-day annual convention — plus an optional Shabbaton afterward — allowed the Israeli rabbis to “show off everything that [they] are doing and [give] the people from abroad a chance to connect so they can support us doing it even more,” Belding-Zidon said.

To make the roughly 250-person convention more manageable, the group was broken up into different tracks, touring different regions of the country and meeting with different groups. On Tuesday, Belding-Zidon participated in a track focused on shared society, which went to different areas in the Negev to see how Masorti communities interact with their neighbors, be they Orthodox Jews in the town of Yerucham or Muslim Bedouins in Rahat.

“Part of the reason why it was amazing was because it wasn’t just a tour. It wasn’t ‘We’re going to go to a mosque [in Rahat], and we’re going to go see this and that on the checklist,’” Belding-Zidon said. “But it’s showing the community work that the Israelis have been doing on the ground. We visited the mosque of people that our colleagues work with all the time.”

Belding-Zidon noted that while Israeli Masorti communities have not necessarily experienced the “surge” in increased engagement that Jewish communities abroad have, the movement has been reaching more people over the past 14 months through its work with the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, as well as growing Israeli interest in egalitarian Judaism.

“More people are finding us through the Masorti movement’s involvement with the Hostage Families. Every day since Oct. 8[, 2023], we’ve been having our prayer circle at Hostage Square [in Tel Aviv]. And that’s become another way that people are brought into the circle of knowing who we are and what we’re about,” she said.

For many of the participants from abroad, the Oct. 7 attacks affected their communities directly.

“Oct. 7 really, really hit us hard,” Ederberg said.

The father of the community’s cook, who was originally from the Gaza border region, was killed in the Oct. 7 attacks, Ederberg said, and the director of the school’s daughter was injured while serving in Lebanon.

Ederberg added that she had gone to rabbinical school in Jerusalem, at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, and had her own ties to the city.

“When Hersh Goldberg-Polin was killed — I know his rabbi, I know his bar mitzvah teacher. And if you walk around here, you’ll have 50 people who are connected to him or now to Omer Neutra — it feels close. It feels very close,” she said.

Brusso, who has been to Israel five times in the past 14 months, said that since Oct. 7, he has tried to foster connection between his congregation in suburban New York with Israeli communities. 

“Usually I come once a year. But after Oct. 7, I felt like I needed to be here as much as I can. There was nothing more important that I could do after Oct. 7 than just be present here. There are a lot of ways to connect with Israel, advocate for Israel, support Israel. But I feel like [having a] relationship is the most important piece,” he said. “[Our synagogue] had a March trip and a July trip. We went to Kfar Azzah [one of the hardest hit communities in the attacks] and we also visited with evacuees from Shlomi [a northern Israeli community that has been shelled by Hezbollah]. And then after the trip, we brought a family from Kfar Aza to New York, and we brought a family from Shlomi to New York. We hosted them… so that people who didn’t come on the trip could hear their stories and form relationships.”

Blumenthal said that in addition to the networking, the mutual support and the opportunity to “pray together and study Torah together,” the Rabbinical Assembly convention also helped educate Conservative and Masorti rabbis ahead of next year’s World Zionist Congress elections. 
“The national institutions [the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod] are an important space for us to be able to advocate for our values of democracy, pluralism and a strong Israel,” Blumenthal said. “So we’re excited that our rabbis are here. They’re learning about the situation here. They’re learning about these issues. They’ll bring what they’ve learned back to their communities. Together with our lay leaders, they will, I hope, participate enthusiastically in the election, including voting for our slate.”

Ed. note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the year of the previous Rabbinical Assembly convention in Israel.