The future of Placement

I attended a very important lunch meeting on the future of our Placement Director and Placement Services. With the vacancy in the Placement Director position (thank goodness for Lenny Thal stepping in to be the interim Placement Director) our Conference is taking the time to imagine and re-imagine what this position and what Placement look light. A task force, chaired by Stephen Pearce has been named by our President Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus to examine and think broadly about the Placement Director and Placement in general.

This was an open meeting to the whole conference over lunch. It was a fairly well attended lunch affinity group with more than 25 people gathered including representatives from the College-Institute, WRN, the Placement Commission and past Director, Arnie Sher and Interim Lenny Thal. Many good suggestions were made by the crowd, including thinking about placement in a movement wide way. What would Placement look like if we had a central placement office for all the professionals of the movement, staffed by multiple specialists?

In an era when there are many other options for congregations and agencies to find Jewish professionals and rabbis in particular why should a congregation or Hillel turn to the Reform movement to engage Reform rabbis? Today the congregations can turn to any one of a number of other seminaries and Jewish job listings to find rabbis. We definitely need to grab this moment to rethink and re-imagine. I hope the Union will want to be as creative. They are are partner in the Placement Commission. But increasingly more than a quarter of our Conference rabbis serve beyond the Movement alone. The jobs just aren't there. And so we as a Conference need to be mindful of not only our dedication to our Reform congregations but to our colleagues. I am pleased that the Board and leadership of our Conference is taking the time to think this through.

This is consistent with the themes of this conference which has been looking at the Jewish future. It was the thread in Ellen's opening remarks at Monday's Shacharit service, it was the focus of yesterday's tiyyulim to cutting edge San Francisco programs, museums and communities and Dollinger's address to us as the kick-off yesterday morning.

Our conference leadership is paying attention that we are in the 21st Century. How refreshing! Bravo to them all.