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NEW YORK — The Orthodox rabbinical group that sparked recent fury from just about every other Jewish religious group in the United States is launching a campaign to bring Reform and Conservative Jews into Orthodoxy.

The effort will involve staffing the Lower East Side offices of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada with volunteer rabbis who will respond to the flurry of phone calls and letters that the group claims it has received since last month, when it declared the Reform and Conservative movements "not Judaism."

The rabbis will help direct people to Orthodox synagogues and rabbis for counseling, said Rabbi Hersh Ginsberg, director of the organization, which claims more than 500 members and proudly describes itself as "right wing."

He said the group has received some 100 letters over the last month, some negative but most "extremely encouraging to us."

Dozens of Reform and Conservative Jews, he said, are "asking for help" to become Orthodox.

Rabbi Lennard Thal, vice president of the Reform movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said of the effort: "Such a campaign is patronizing, unwelcome and ultimately pathetic."

The chancellor of the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, declined comment.

"I don't want to demean myself" by responding to the plans of a group as marginal as the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, he said.

Also this week, top Jewish fund-raisers met with representatives of the Reform and Conservative movements to find ways to raise more money for their programs in Israel.

Talks were held in Chicago, where the United Jewish Appeal is holding board meetings.

Under consideration is a plan to allocate $20 million a year — $10 million each "in designated giving" — to Reform and Conservative enterprises, said Richard Wexler, national UJA chairman.

That money would be "over and above" the allocations federations make for overseas needs, he stressed.

Federations allocate a portion of their campaign money to UJA for distribution overseas and keep the remainder at home for local programs. UJA and the federations' umbrella body, the Council of Jewish Federations, are in the process of forging a partnership.

The joint campaign has been under increasing pressure from the grass roots to allocate more of its money to the non-Orthodox streams in Israel, where Orthodoxy has an official monopoly over religious affairs.

Recent efforts by Orthodox parties in Israel to legislate Orthodox control have prompted some American Jews to threaten a boycott of the campaign.

UJA has responded by trying to send the message that such a boycott would only hurt the Jewish needy around the world as well as the funding for the religious streams in Israel.

For its part, CJF recently recommended doubling the spending for Reform and Conservative programs in Israel.

The system currently allocates about $1 million each to Reform and Conservative programs there and about half a million dollars to the Orthodox.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said Chicago's meeting was the first in a series with UJA aimed at creating a "closer partnership" and finding ways to secure more funding for non-Orthodox programs in Israel.