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"The minute we started giving education that was committed to tradition and appreciative of modernity at the same time, people beat a path to the door and said, `We want that,'" said Segal, president of Jerusalem's Beit Midrash, which started as a rabbinical seminary and has expanded to offer programs for graduate students and Israeli youngsters alike.

"We discovered those two million Jews. They're out there," said Segal, who recently visited the Bay Area as part of a national tour to expose American Jews to Beit Midrash and the Masorti movement. "They're desperate for this stuff."

"This stuff" refers to programs such as TALI schools, which belong to the general public school system but offer an extra two hours a week of Jewish studies. Currently, some 30 TALI schools exist in Israel; the Ministry of Education has committed to helping Beit Midrash create up to 15 new schools in the coming years.

"Here's a revolution in Jewish education in Israel," said Segal, who served as leader of Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto from 1969 to 1973 and made aliyah during the Yom Kippur War.

"Maybe you should see tefillin before you become bar or bat mitzvah. If you walk into a synagogue you should be comfortable looking at a siddur. You should know what giving tzedakah is about. You should know what lighting candles is about. There is a huge consensus in Israel that teaching basic Yiddishkeit, to be good Jewish people, is a good thing."

According to Segal, who formerly directed Camp Ramah's program in Israel, exposing Israelis to such Masorti-sponsored programs as TALI schools is helping the movement meet one of its greatest challenges: "how to declare itself a normative Judaism and how to share that fact with Israelis who have been told by a power structure for 50 years that this is not normative, that this is some sect, that this is illegitimate."

Along those lines, the recent initial success of a controversial conversion bill that would legalize the Orthodox chief rabbinate's final say over conversions performed in Israel has been one of the most significant statements to Israelis, he said, that non-Orthodox Judaism "is not true Judaism."

Conservative and Reform leaders say the bill delegitimizes their movements not only in Israel, but also in the United States, where less than 10 percent of the Jewish population identifies as Orthodox.

"The issue in Israel is the issue of Jewish identity and the reputation of Judaism," Segal said. "That issue is broader than Conservative Judaism. It's an issue in which Judaism has been made a matter of politics, a matter of power, instead of a matter of promise or personal identity."

Segal expressed firm optimism that efforts by liberal Jewish movements to expand the bounds of religious pluralism in Israel will mean a new Israel for the future.

"The reason Israel is going to change in the long run," he said, "is that there is a tidal wave forming under the surface of people who know Judaism belongs to all Jews and there are many ways to view God's Torah."