At its recent Board of Governors gathering (June 2026), the Jewish Agency for Israel issued a statement declaring that “a diverse, pluralistic and tolerant Judaism has been and remains one of the cornerstones of Zionism.”
It is a pleasing sentiment. It is also untrue – provably so, from the movement’s own founding documents.
The cornerstone of Zionism was never a theology. It was peoplehood. Theodor Herzl built the movement on a single premise, stated plainly in Der Judenstaat: “We are a people – one people.”
Precisely because the Jews of 1897 could not agree on Judaism, Herzl’s achievement was to set religion aside as the basis of the enterprise. Would the Jewish state be a theocracy? “No, indeed... We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks.” Religion – in every form – was to be respected and contained, not enthroned as a founding value.
Herzl’s oft-quoted promise that “every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief, as he is in his nationality”, was a pledge of civic liberty extended to all future citizens, Jew and non-Jew alike. It was freedom of conscience – not a declaration that competing denominations constitute Zionism’s foundation. To read it otherwise is to confuse a civil right with a religious ideology.
History of the Jewish Agency
History is even less kind to the Agency’s formulation. The movements that today carry the banner of “pluralistic Judaism” were not Zionism’s cornerstone; they were among its most determined opponents.
The Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 declared: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine...” In July 1897 – weeks before the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel – the Central Conference of American Rabbis resolved its total disapproval of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. In 1942, Reform rabbis founded the American Council for Judaism for the express purpose of fighting Zionism.
The Reform movement entered the World Zionist Organization only in the late 1970s and fully reconciled with Zionism only in its 1997 Miami Platform. A cornerstone cannot be laid one hundred years after the foundation – least of all by those who opposed the construction.
The Conservative movement fares a little better in this history – yet its record, too, refutes the Agency’s claim. Solomon Schechter, the architect of American Conservative Judaism, endorsed Zionism in 1906 – but as a bulwark against assimilation and an ally of traditional Judaism, not as a warrant for pluralism.
He did so over the public objections of his own seminary’s patrons, and his successor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Cyrus Adler, remained a committed non-Zionist. Institutionally, the movement joined the World Zionist Organization only with the founding of Mercaz in 1976. Where early Conservative Zionism existed, it was an argument from peoplehood and tradition – which is precisely our point.
The Jewish Agency’s statement also invoked the Western Wall. For the sake of historical integrity and honesty, we refer readers to the Memorandum on the Western Wall, submitted in 1930 to the Special Commission of the League of Nations on behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine – the direct precursor of today’s Jewish Agency for Israel, written by the same Cyrus Adler, Ph.D., D.H.L., then president of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In the section titled “Action
Requested,” Adler wrote: “We now come to the request that we will make to your honorable body on behalf of the Jewish Agency: That you give recognition to the immemorial claim that the Kotel Maaravi (Western Wall) is a Holy Place to the Jews; that they should have the right of access to it for prayers to be conducted in accordance with their ritual in a decent and dignified manner; that the regulation of such services shall be under the direction of the Rabbinate in Jerusalem, who shall assume responsibility therefor.”
Such is all that is requested now – that which the president of the Conservative movement’s own seminary, writing for the Jewish Agency itself, requested then.
What, then, was the movement’s actual founding arrangement on religion? The Basel Program of 1897 contains not a single word of religious law. When the question arose, the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 resolved that Zionism would undertake nothing contrary to the precepts of the Jewish religion – a pledge of deference to traditional Judaism, offered to keep Orthodox Jewry within the tent.
The paper trail settles the matter. Language about “mutual respect for the multi-faceted Jewish people” entered the movement’s platform only in the 2004 Jerusalem Program. It appears nowhere in 1897, and nowhere in the 1951 revision.
The Zionist movement’s own constitutional documents date the concept – and refute the words “has been.” And, let us be brutally honest, a politically (and financially) motivated phrase added to the World Zionist Organization Jerusalem Program by a small group of delegates does not redefine Zionism.
Some will object that Zionism was always a big tent, and that is true: the World Zionist Organization has housed secular, religious, socialist, and Revisionist factions for well over a century. But coalition politics is not theology.
A Congress in which Mizrachi and Poalei Zion (a movement of Marxist Zionist Jewish workers) sat together did not thereby declare all Judaisms equally valid; it declared the Jewish people indivisible.
Herzl’s Altneuland preached civic tolerance – its villain is the demagogue who would deny others a share in the commonwealth – but tolerance among citizens is not “pluralistic Judaism” as a creed. Both partners to the founding compact, the secular majority and the religious Zionists, would have rejected such a creed.
It would have shattered the coalition from either side.
Why does this matter? Because the Jewish Agency is a national institution, entrusted with the heritage of the entire Jewish people.
The Jewish Agency is the largest Jewish non-profit organization in the world, serving as the primary link between the State of Israel and Jewish communities globally. It is responsible for facilitating aliyah, managing global shlichut programs, and strengthening Jewish identity. The organization is funded by global philanthropic efforts, including the Jewish Federations of North America, KKL/JNF, Keren HaYesod, and the Israeli government.
When it converts a contested contemporary agenda into a founding principle, it does not honor history – it rewrites it. Religious pluralism is a position some hold; but they can not smuggle it into Basel.
Zionism’s cornerstone was, and remains, Klal Yisrael – the unity of one people. That foundation is broad enough for every Jew who ever prayed, in any accent, “Next year in Jerusalem.” It requires no retroactive renovation.
The writer is chairman of Eretz HaKodesh, a slate representing Torah Jewry in the World Zionist Congress/Organization, and serves on the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel.