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Liberal American Jews should pat themselves on the back, a top leader of the Reform movement says.

"It was only because of American Jews that the conversion legislation was stopped," said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America.

Even now that efforts for resolving the conversion crisis through negotiations have failed and the battle over religious pluralism continues, "the mere frustration of the legislation itself is a huge victory," he said Monday in an interview at the Bulletin offices. "American Jews have a central role in this. They should take heart."

Hirsch, who is based in New York, stopped in the Bay Area this week to meet with rabbis, federation leaders and average Reform Jews. He tours the country often to take the pulse of movement members and drum up support for ARZA.

He believes American Jews should be energized by their ability to mobilize and effect change. "What was always described as a juggernaut, the Orthodox fundamentalist power, has in fact been negated by the part of the world Jewish community that doesn't even reside in Israel.

"If you can do that, you can certainly accomplish much greater things," he said.

Among the greater things needing to be accomplished, he said, is a collective redefinition of the global Jewish community. With most Soviet, Ethiopian and Syrian Jews rescued from strife and persecution, saving world Jewry is no longer the primary task facing Jews.

"It's almost an unprecedented historical situation that there are no oppressed Jewish communities in the world," Hirsch noted. "All Jews, with some minor exceptions, are essentially free to travel and work and create."

Now, he added, "the great task and great struggle is to unleash the genius of the Jewish people and to create a society in Israel that will impact positively on world Jewry and on humanity. That is the manifest destiny of the Jewish people."