Until now, there has not been an organization overseeing, evaluating and endorsing the various continuing educational opportunities that today's pulpit rabbi can take advantage of.

In 2007, representatives of Lasko Family Foundations, STAR (Synagogues, Transformation and Renewal), IJS ( The Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Oraita (Hebrew College) and JESNA's Center for Research and Evaluation met in Philadelphia to discuss ways to formalize and strengthen those continuing education opportunities.

In April, 2008, 34 professional leaders of all of the rabbinical schools, rabbinical organizations and individual program providers met in New York to address the possibility of creating an Alliance for Continuing Rabbinic Education.  Consensus was reached to form a Steering Committee and a smaller Design Team to plan the First National Conference on Continuing Rabbinic Education.  Members of the Design Team chaired six Working Groups whose task it was to begin to investigate suggested key areas of cooperation, collaboration and knowledge-sharing as the basis for the Conference's program.  Rabbi Rachel Cowan and Rabbi Gerald Weider were chosen as co-chairs of the Design Team and the Conference.

Seventy-eight leaders, representing the diversity of the Jewish community, actively participated in the Conference, held in New York on September 10, 2008.  The overwhelming consensus of the participants was that an Alliance for Continuing Rabbinic Education should be created and that the first steps in its development should be a Mission, Vision and Values Statement, governance procedures and a website which would be the clearinghouse for information about all continuing rabbinic education programs.

The Mission, Vision and Values Statement has been ratified.  The website is in its early stages of reaching its ambitious goals and the governance procedures of the Alliance will be ratified at a Steering Committee meeting of the Alliance for Continuing Rabbinic Education on April 28, 2008 in New York.

We invite you to keep visiting this website to monitor the steady, incremental but very exciting growth of the Alliance for Continuing Rabbinic Education.