Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

The leaders of religious Orthodoxy have awakened very late to what they believe to be the "danger" of Conservative and Reform Judaism. The first conferences of a Reform movement were held way back in 1844. By 1880, the successes of reformist congregations in America were closely related to the massive German-Jewish immigration of the 1840s, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations was created in 1873. This does not sound like a movement of wild innovation.

Since then, the major developments in Conservatism and Reform have been the sharp swing to Zionism, especially since the 1967 Six-Day War, and the brilliant achievements of Jewish higher institutions of learning in various fields of Jewish scholarship. Today, Conservative Jews insist on the sacredness of the Sabbath and stress Jewish nationalism as inseparable from the moral and intellectual culture of the Jewish people. They give passionate support to the secular Zionist movement.

As ambassador to the United States, I was personally honored by doctorates from Yeshiva University, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Hebrew Union Colleges in Jerusalem and Cincinnati. An Israeli diplomat who spurned these contacts would be making a fool of himself.

In Conservative institutions, there has been a movement away from Orthodoxy by ordaining women rabbis, but this is a response to universal American concepts, not a rebellion.

In Israel, the Orthodox establishment has been reluctant to acknowledge the Zionist fervor of Conservative and Reform Jews. The embarrassing fact that the major Zionist offensive in the 1940s was led by an eminent Reform rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver, is held as a dark secret by the Orthodox establishment.

Another achievement of Conservative and Reform Jews has been their numerical domination of the Jewish scene. They are believed to number about 80 percent of those American Jews who claim a Jewish identity. If this is true, or even a rough estimate, it follows that Israel's cause is undermined by the antagonisms that define the current relations between the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements.

Israeli leaders, such as Finance Minister Ya'acov Ne'eman and Jewish Agency Chairman Avraham Burg, are rendering invaluable service to Israel by their devotion to the prospect of united action and common purpose by all the Jewish religious movements.

Against this background, it is clear that discrimination against the Judaism practiced by Conservative and Reform Jews is discordant with Israeli and Zionist traditions. No kind of Jewish unity can flourish on that basis. There is no justification for preventing Conservative Jews from praying, men and women together, at the Western Wall.

It is not sufficiently stressed that there is something distinctively anti-American in the hostility expressed by some sectors of Orthodoxy against the newer movements in Judaism.

The founding fathers of the United States had good reason to create, in the First Amendment of their Constitution, a spiritual domain, remote from political contagion, in which the only thing demanded of Jewish adherents was mutual tolerance. Americans are inspired by their religions without being enslaved by them. If the founders had not understood the cruciality of this provision, it is possible that North America would be fragmented into a dozen separate states, each with its own established creed.

All that the U.S. Constitution asks of those sworn to defend it is that they transcend their diversity by universal respect for all faiths — even those which some of them consider to be deviant. It is intolerable that the only citizens who have to listen to attacks on their faith should be Conservative and Reform Jews, who are just as integral to the unifying Jewish experience as are the other adherents of their faith.

In historic terms, the relatively new movements in Judaism were attempting to "Americanize" their devotions by making them congenial to the movement and impulse of the present age. The need to adapt new realties to changing conditions is not an offense against existing traditions. It may turn out to be their only salvation.

For most of the 50 years culminating in the jubilee celebrations, the foundations of our state were laid jointly by coalitions of the Labor movement with the main bodies of religious Zionism. In the mid-1970s there was a sharp swing of the religious movement toward diplomatic theories that have become more militant and less consensual than before. The turn to the right of religious Zionism is a more serious symptom — and cause — of our present malaise than are the theological differences that divide the Israeli nation.

Nothing would help Israel more than the re-constitution of the historic alliance that brought this nation to birth.