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The High Holy Day crowds are an illusion. The vibrancy you see and feel is temporary. The commitment is short-lived. As your fist pounds your chest with recitation of each personal and communal sin, missing from the list is the sin of willful disregard for the Jewish future.

On a national level, it already has been decided who shall live and who shall die. Fast approaching is Kaddish time for the American Jewish community. And if anyone is left with the inclination to recite the mourner's prayer, they probably won't be Jewish by halachic standards.

Nearly every dimension of organized Jewish life is in decline. The only factor that is on the rise is intermarriage. "In 50 years, all we will have left is a small Chassidic enclave," says Brenda Lipitz, national chair of the Council of Jewish Federation's Women's Division.

She may be right. Our numbers are shrinking because Jewish couples are having around 1.8 babies each, well below the replacement level of 2.1.

But far more ominously, the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey revealed an interfaith marriage rate of 52 percent. In reality, that number is higher. Factor out the Orthodox, and it approaches 60 percent.

And all the talk of intermarriage bringing in new Jews is over-hyped. Less than 25 percent of children of interfaith marriages are being raised as Jews and 90 percent of them will marry out anyway, says Steve Bayme, director of Jewish Communal Affairs for the American Jewish Committee. "Their parents married out, why shouldn't the children? All constraints are gone."

According to Professor Steven Cohen of the Melton Center at Hebrew University, more that nine out of 10 grandchildren of intermarried Jews will be raised as something other than Jews. "If things continue as they are," warns Rabbi Irving Greenberg, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, "then I think in 50 years we will be down to 20 to 30 percent of where we are now."

In two generations, the American Jewish community will shrivel from today's 5.8 million to a mere shadow of a community. And certainly not one that can sustain Jewish life and its institutions in any meaningful way.

"The organized Jewish community is in the process of self-destructing," says Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, president of The Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. One result, he predicts, is that "centralized fund-raising will be a thing of the past in a decade."

We are already running out of money and the future is bleak. The Council of Jewish Federations estimates that Jewish federations in the largest 50 communities receive $3.5 billion from public funds for various social services. Under a budget-cutting Republican-led Congress, those moneys have been shrinking drastically.

Depending on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election, those funds might even be eliminated. "There is no way the Jewish community can make up the difference," says Diana Aviv, director of the CJF Washington Action Office.

The combined federation campaigns in 1995 raised $728.4 million nationally, including $18.6 million for the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and $2.8 million for the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay. "I'd like to say that the annual campaign has kept pace with inflation over the past 15 years, but the truth is that it hasn't," says a top UJA official.

What's worse is that the base of donors is shrinking along generational lines. While 81 percent of Jews 65 and over give to Jewish causes, only 50 percent of those under 40 contribute.

Even if fund-raising kept pace with inflation, which it doesn't, it is expected that communal coffers will be emptied just caring for the elderly. With 19 percent of the American Jewish community age 65 or older, that number should rise significantly with projected longer life spans.

The community is also having difficulty serving its younger members. While Jewish education has worked its way up the communal agenda — perhaps too little, too late — the structure of the community has tragically remained the same: insular, elitist, male and older. It is no wonder that our communal institutions remain largely out of touch and impervious to new thinking.

The centrifugal forces pulling the community apart are stronger than the gravitational ones that normally keep it together. This dynamic is sharpest in relations between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox, who have been clashing on a growing list of issues. The interdenominational Synagogue Council disbanded largely as a result of Orthodox indifference. And while more than 70 percent of American Jews support the peace process, the Orthodox community is largely opposed.

But these divisive issues pale in comparison to the impending battle over patrilineal descent. In 1983 the Reform movement, the largest and fastest-growing segment of American Jewry, affirmed that Jewish lineage can be transmitted by both the father and the mother, overturning rabbinic tradition that only affirms matrilineal descent.

However, the majority of children of the next generation will not be recognized as Jews by the Orthodox.

Historians will document that the decline of what was the world's largest, wealthiest and most powerful diaspora community could have been prevented. But at a time when the crisis in continuity demanded innovation, lack of imagination became the norm.

"The community does not understand how to package and market Jewish life, nor is it really interested in supporting those projects that speak to a new generation," complains Jay Sanderson, executive director of the Jewish Television Network.

"They just don't get it," says Larry Yudelson of the Jewish Communications Network.

The refrain of Yudelson, a man in his mid-30s, is one heard on many different levels.

"I'm a strong believer in ideology and visions," says Rabbi Art Vernon, director of educational development for the Jewish Educational Service of North America. "For a minority to continue, it either needs strong boundaries that define who it is from the outside, or it needs a strong mission ideology to define it from the inside. I don't see either existing now and I question whether they will in the future."

It's time for Jewish leaders to end the charade. We should cease the silly custom of dipping apples in honey. Dip them in vinegar and taste the impending bitter end of what was once a glorious and vibrant American Jewish community. It is no longer a question of if American Jewry will be penciled in the Book of Death, just when.

Yosef I. Abramowitz is editor of the Jewish Family & Life! webzine (www.Jewishfamily.com), newsletter and a forthcoming parenting guide by Western/ Golden Books.