Sentenced to Marriage: Chained Women in Wartime
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On September 7, 1971, military chaplain Rabbi Aryeh Lev wrote a long and detailed letter to renowned Reform Rabbi Solomon Freehof describing the break-up of the Committee on Responsa (COR) of the Jewish Welfare Board. He explained how mainstream rabbinical organizations had slowly abandoned, and finally dissolved the Committee which had been on the decline since the end of World War II. During its golden years, between 1942 and 1945, the Committee on Responsa achieved something remarkable: all three major denominations in Judaism - Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform - worked together to make Jewish legal or halakhic decisions for servicemen in the American military. Today, fractious fighting between Jewish religious denominations makes it difficult to fathom how such a committee could have existed.