Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Follow Up to JTS survey

In my last post, I questioned who JTS was sending the survey to and I why everyone did not get it. This past week, I was at a wedding and was sitting next to a JTS graduate. This graduate is mentioned on the United Synagogue webpage as a former USYer who helped develop a webpage Kosher New York. If the Conservative Movement wants to take credit for this person you would think they would email them a survey on this issue, right? Think again. He didn't get any survey in his email. I spoke as well to another JTS graduate who is living in Israel who did not receive the survey either. Not only is my friend in Israel a JTS graduate, his father is a Conservative Rabbi who graduated from the Seminary and he never saw the survey. As a matter of fact, he asked me to email him the survey because he wanted to see it. I once again went to the JTS webpage and tried to find the survey but was not successful. I am not sure what the result of this survey is but I am sure they did not reach out to the people who care about this issue. I also find it funny that everyone that I know that has graduated JTS that has any form of connection to Yiddishkeit is now Orthodox. What does that say about JTS and the whole Conservative movement? If the movement had any intelligence, instead of surveying people within the movement about how they can increase membership and improve their shuls, maybe they should ask people why they left the movement instead because they might learn something.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was a random survey... Not Every Rabbi or Shul leader got it. When you read about a presidential poll in the news, that is around 1,000 people representing 200 Million. And they don't want to reach only he people who care, they want to reach a cross section of the conservative community. In the poll they asked questions to figure out what peoples interest is, Kashrut at home, out, shul attendance...etc. Then of course there are the nuts like me who write about it in their blogs

socialworker/frustrated mom said...

I agree with ywl makes sense that you give surveys to a random number of people as a sampling.

Anonymous said...

Very interesting.

FrumWithQuestions said...

YWL- What you said makes sense but I still don't understand why they wouldn't want everyones opinion rather than a select few since this will affect everyone who is involved with the Conservative movement.