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CLEVELAND — Most major Jewish organizations hailed this week's federal appeals court decision striking down the Cleveland school voucher program as unconstitutional. But some of their members are not cheering the court action as loudly as they once did.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, sitting in Cincinnati, ruled 2-1 that Cleveland's school vouchers principally went to religious institutions, thus violating the Constitution's separation of church and state. As states around the country debate and establish controversial voucher programs, the Ohio ruling may very likely become the test case reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Orthodox Jews, who typically send their children to Jewish day schools, have long supported publicly financed tuition vouchers. But Conservative and Reform Jews, historic opponents of state aid to parochial schools, have begun enrolling their own children in Jewish day schools in growing numbers. Now they are re-examining their earlier anti-voucher stance.

"The Jewish community doesn't look at the church-state issue the same way it used to," says Joel Ratner, Cleveland-based regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, which filed an amicus curiae brief opposing the voucher program. "Vouchers is the issue where that change is most felt. Clearly the consensus that existed in previous decades has broken down."

While proponents say the educational choice provided by the 5-year-old Cleveland voucher program is a way for low-income children to escape failing public inner-city schools, the judges ruled parents had no real options.

No suburban and few non-religious schools accept the vouchers. About 96 percent of the 3,700 participating students use the state aid of up to $2,5000 to attend mostly Catholic schools.

"Accordingly, we hold that…the voucher program has the primary effect of advancing religion, and that it constitutes an endorsement of religion and sectarian education in violation of the Establishment Clause," wrote Judge Eric Clay.

The hostile, bitter language exchanged by the dissenting and majority judges in the decision astonished attorney Harry Brown, president of Agudath Israel of Cleveland and vice president of the national Orthodox organization, which filed an amicus curiae brief seeking to uphold the voucher program. "They just don't do that," he said.

While its members may no longer all agree, Jewish organizations reacted to the decision along historic lines, with Orthodox institutions deploring the ruling, the remainder applauding it.

Today's ruling "is a decisive rebuttal to those who believe that vouchers are compatible with religious liberty," said American Jewish Congress Executive Director Phil Baum.

"The court's decision bolsters those who oppose efforts to erode the cherished constitutional principle of church-state separation with respect to public funding of religious schools," said Bruce Ramer, president of the American Jewish Committee.

The way Jews view education has changed and that's reflected in the voucher and related church-state separation issues, said Joyce Garver Keller, a lobbyist for Ohio Jewish Communities.

"Under a different set of circumstances, Jews [saw] public tax money going to pay for religious education that was Christian," she said. "There was a feeling it wasn't appropriate for public tax dollars to be spent to promote religion and someone else's religion…Tax money for religious schools today, some say, is not to promote religion but to allow Jews to go to Jewish schools."

Said Brown: "There's a definite change in how the Jewish community views vouchers." The change comes along with the recognition of the problem of Jewish assimilation and the growth of day schools to address that concern, he added.

"There's ample room within the constitutional separation of church and state to permit vouchers," Brown said. "Programs need to be carefully designed…so that they don't further religion."

Cleveland civil rights attorney Kenneth D. Myers, who has written about vouchers for Time magazine, thinks the "drift in Jewish opinion…is related to the viability of public schools, rather than to the church-state issue. The only reason that anybody perceives a need for vouchers is because of failures of public schools. The question of who pays is somewhat secondary."