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Conservative Judaism is at a crossroads.

The movement’s constituents increasingly are leading lives at odds with the core values and rules of Conservative Judaism, especially when it comes to intermarriage. The number of Conservative Jews has shrunk by one-third over the last 25 years. And even some of the movement’s brightest success stories, like the leaders of thriving independent egalitarian minyans, eschew formal association with the movement.

In this movement committed to Jewish tradition but seeing its young people walk out the door — to Reform Judaism more than anywhere else — community leaders have struggled to figure out how to appeal to a new generation of Jews without abandoning their core values or becoming a near-facsimile of Reform.

“Tradition and change has long been considered a tagline of Conservative Judaism, a concise statement of what we are about,” said Margo Gold, international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the movement’s congregational arm. “But in the 21st century, the vision of Conservative Judaism requires that we rethink this as a community and see what we really want our core message to be.”

USCJ CEO Rabbi Steven Wernick speaks last week at the group’s biennial conference outside Chicago photo/jta–uscj

Gold’s remarks came at the United Synagogue’s biennial conference, held last week in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg. As part of the effort to reposition Conservative Judaism, United Synagogue has launched a $350,000 rebranding effort and hired a branding firm, Good Omen.

“We’ve bought into the narrative of decline of our own movement,” United Synagogue’s CEO, Rabbi Steven Wernick, said in his address. “We need to stop shraying our kups [Yiddish for ‘screaming our heads off’] about everything that is bad and get to work.”

The focal point for the dilemma over how much to stick to tradition versus how much to change has been intermarriage. Though the movement forbids it and does not count as Jews those whose fathers are the sole Jewish parent, four out of every 10 Conservative Jews are marrying out of the faith, and community leaders want to reach out to intermarried Jews.

“We’re in an awkward situation where the sociology is pushing us in one direction, but our organizational structure is hindering us moving in the direction we need to be moving,” said Rabbi Charles Simon, executive director of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs and an outspoken Conservative proponent of embracing interfaith families.

There was perhaps no better illustration at the conference of the movement’s identity crisis than at its penultimate session. Led by Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, some 200 to 300 participants tried to brainstorm a new tagline for the movement — something that could convey its essence, appeal to young Jews and fit on a bumper sticker.

“ ‘Tradition and change’ is actually not a slogan; it is a paradox,” said Wolpe, who 15 years ago led a push to rename the movement Covenantal Judaism. “It says: We stand for two exactly opposite things. We are the oxymoronic movement.”

Between 1990 and 2013, the number of American Jewish adults who self-identify as Conservative dropped from about 1.5 million to 962,000, according to an analysis by sociologist Steven M. Cohen, a professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, based on the 1990 National Jewish Population Study and the 2013 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Jews.

The Pew survey also showed that the number of Conservative Jews ages 55-64 who say they are synagogue members is almost triple the number among those 35-44, and that only 13 percent of Conservative Jews attend religious services at least once a week.

That’s bad news for United Synagogue, which has seen the number of its member synagogues fall to 580 today from 630 in 2013 and 675 in 2009.

United Synagogue is one of the Conservative movement’s three main arms; the others are the Rabbinical Assembly and its flagship New York rabbinical school, the Jewish Theological Seminary.

The movement’s own restrictions compound the debate about how to chart the way forward. Conservative rabbis are not permitted to officiate at — and aren’t even supposed to attend — interfaith weddings, putting them at a disadvantage when congregants or their children in interfaith relationships seek a rabbi to wed them. (Reform rabbis may officiate at intermarriages.)

Likewise, the Conservative movement does not recognize so-called patrilineal Jews, while the Reform movement does, as long as the children are raised as Jews. Some Conservative institutions nevertheless allow patrilineal children into their schools and educational programs, but they may draw a line when it comes to allowing the child to have a bar mitzvah.

“We need to address patrilineality,” Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz of the Tri-City Jewish Center in Rock Island, Illinois, said during a conference session. “The reality of what’s happening in the movement is not reflective of the reality of what is happening on the ground.”

On the plus side, many participants at the conference, which drew several hundred people, said United Synagogue has become better at servicing its constituent congregations, about 170 of which sent representatives to the conference.

In recent years, United Synagogue has struggled with yawning deficits, a rebellion against fees by a group of member congregations, and criticism of cutbacks that included staff layoffs and the elimination of the organization’s college program, Koach.

But the deficit has been narrowing. In 2011 and 2012, the cumulative budget deficit was $6 million. In 2013-2014, it was $2.8 million, and this year’s projected deficit is $600,000. United Synagogue’s total budget is about $25 million.

Earlier this year, United Synagogue sold its two-floor condo in midtown Manhattan for $15.9 million. Half of that money is being used to create an $8 million sustaining foundation that will support programming but will be controlled by a separate board of directors. The balance will go to operations.

“We are closing the budget gap,” said Wernick. “That’s our No. 1 priority.”