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, and still influences some Reform Jews who hold classicist views to this day.
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."
[4] The cornerstone of his position is that "modification of any kind and in any degree of what had long been established could not fail to be incompatible with halakha [Orthodox religious law] and that the rule was absolute and all-embracing.
The Union's 1937 Columbus Platform included a more nuanced endorsement of Zionism, noting "In all lands where our people live, they assume and seek to share loyally the full duties and responsibilities of citizenship and to create seats of Jewish knowledge and religion.
"[8] This major re-statement of the "Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism" was an acceptance of the massive demographic shift caused by recent waves of eastern European Jewish immigrants attracted to Zionism, as well as influential pro-Zionist Reform rabbis like Stephen S. Wise, Abba Hillel Silver, and Max Raisin, the formation of the competing and "ardently Zionist"[9] American Jewish Congress, and the recent sharp increase in European antisemitism brought on by the rise of Fascism.
Prominent Reform rabbis who were more integrationist, unwilling to abandon the principle that Jews should live as free and equal citizens in the United States and other countries around the world, and who rejected the idea in 1942 of a religiously segregated Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies, formed the American Council for Judaism.
The 1999 platform called for "renewed attention" to "sacred obligations," of which it mentioned the observance of holidays and Shabbat, prayer, and the study of Torah and the Hebrew language.