According to the menu, "an elegant French cuisine dinner composed of nine courses and five alcoholic drinks would be served.… By any standard, the party was lavish, even in an age of excess.
The cost was defrayed by wealthy Jews ("Cincinnati's leading Jewish families"), at the head of whom was Julius Freiberg, the business partner and neighbor of Samuel Levy, the husband of a daughter of Jacob Ezekiel, who was Secretary of the Board of Hebrew Union College.
Adams (today's Eden Park), and served by funicular, it had a commanding view of the city, with upper and lower esplanades, on which concerts, parades, and picnics were held.
An eyewitness (the last living attendee, David Philipson) wrote, almost sixty years later, that "terrific excitement ensued when two rabbis rose from their seats and rushed from the room.
Another eyewitness, Henrietta Szold, commented in a letter, published in The Jewish Messenger on July 27, that the number who were indignant was "surprisingly small.
In a letter to the editor of the American Hebrew dated July 16, he complains: The outrage perpetrated at last week's banquet was not an unheard of occurrence among the Hebrew clergy of America.On several occasions of a public character, men notably supposed to champion the Revealed Law, sat at tables laden with the flesh of animals whose vital blood remained therein, and with that of loathsome things which creep in ponds and on the ground.
Isaac Wise replied on August 3 to "our Philadelphia friend" (Morais) who "chastises the American Israelite because it did not condemn or at least denounce that terrible misdeed of that said unscrupulous caterer".
"[2]: 35 Our Jewish contemporaries seem to be a good deal exercised in mind over the menu of a dinner recently given by Cincinnati Israelites to visiting rabbis and laymen.
The American Hebrew speaks of these dishes as "the abomination of Talmud and Poskim", and wants to know whether the eleventh chapter of Leviticus is omitted from the edition of the Pentateuch in use in Cincinnati.
But, on the contrary, the American Israelite affirms that "Not a murmur, not a word of displeasure, not a sign of disappointment was observable among the 300 or 400 ladies and gentlemen who partook of the entertainment.
"[15]Whether Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the president of Hebrew Union College and leader of American Reform Judaism, was aware of the menu plans of the banquet committee is not known.
"[2]: 39 He declined to apologize and condemn the banquet, and instead dismissed "kitchen Judaism" and argued that the dietary laws were obsolete and cheapened the religion in the eyes of others.
They had become members of the Union most unwillingly, and the association with the congregations that held more modern views being most distasteful to them, they were looking almost from the very start for some pretext to at least excuse, if not justify, their withdrawal.