Pittsburgh Platform

The Pittsburgh Platform is a pivotal 1885 document in the history of the American Reform Movement in Judaism that called for Jews to adopt a modern approach to the practice of their faith. While it was never formally adopted by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) or the Central Conference of American Rabbis founded four years after its release, and several Rabbis who remained associated with Reform in its wake attempted to distance themselves from it, the platform exerted great influence over the movement in the next fifty years.

The most important principles of Judaism as practiced by the largest Jewish denomination in the United States were laid out in eight concise paragraphs:

This founding document of what has come to be called "Classical Reform" ideology was the culmination of a meeting of Reform rabbis from November 16–19, 1885 at the Concordia Club in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It explicitly calls for a rejection of those laws which have a ritual, rather than moral, basis. An example of a ritual rejected by the Pittsburgh Platform is kashrut, or the observance of Jewish dietary laws. These ritual laws were seen as detracting from Jewish life in the modern era by placing undue emphasis on ritual, rather than ethical considerations.

The platform affirms God's existence, and recognized a universal desire in all religions to experience "the indwelling of God in man." In this vein, the Pittsburgh Platform also calls for a recognition of the inherent worth of Christianity and Islam, although it still holds that Judaism was the "highest conception of the God-idea."

Instead of a nation, the Pittsburgh Platform defines Jews in the modern world as a religious community within their pluralistic nations. For this reason, there was an explicit rejection of Zionism in the form that maintained that Jews were "in exile" anywhere except in what is now Israel and should all move to Israel as soon as possible; that version of Zionism was viewed as completely inapplicable to American Jews because they were at home in America and to other communities of Jews in free countries around the world. The platform seems to acknowledge the concept of Jewish chosenness accepting in the Bible "the consecration of the Jewish people to its mission as the priest of the one God."

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