The merged rabbinic body is known today as MORASHAH (acronym for Hebrew: מועצת רבנים שומרי ההלכה, lit.
The UTJ produced the educational curriculum "Taking the MTV Challenge—Media and Torah Values" designed to provide high-school students with tools to respond to the electronic media.
Its antecedent was a group of traditionalist Conservative rabbis, led by former Jewish Theological Seminary of America Talmud professor David Weiss Halivni, who broke with the movement because of ideological differences, including the approach to changes in Halakha and the manner in which the issue of admitting women to the rabbinate was addressed.
Rabbi Halivni and other traditionalists claimed that in this and other areas of Jewish Law, the Conservative movement had made decisions to change from traditional practices in a legislative rather than a judicial fashion, by poll or majority vote.
Traditionalists believed that halakhic decision-making should be made by Talmud and Halakha scholars following a process of legal reasoning.
As such, it stands in between Modern Orthodox Judaism, which retains a belief that the current written Torah and Oral Torah were transmitted in an unbroken tradition from what was received by Moses on Mount Sinai through Divine revelation, and Conservative Judaism, which in the UTJ's view has sometimes permitted personal views to override classical halakhic scholarship.
It also offered, in cooperation with nearby Fairleigh Dickinson University, a Masters in Public Administration degree with a concentration in Jewish communal service.
It emerged from bankruptcy in January 2011,[13] but sold its headquarters building in Teaneck, NJ in order to pay its debts at one hundred cents on the dollar.