We must cultivate greater sensitivity to the personal and family needs of the intermarried, coupled with a keen awareness of the institutional culture of the organized Jewish community. We must recognize that we may not yet have all the answers to balancing commitment to continuity and retaining the loyalty of large masses of America's Jewry.

Egon Mayer addressing plenary

Ultimately, all our conversations about outreach to the intermarried are really about a larger issue. They are about how we perpetuate a great culture, a philosophy of life and a way of living that has carried the Jewish people through the most incredible human dramas of history to produce a compassionate nation, able to care about others selflessly, a people able to weather the heaviest human storms with their dignity intact.

Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald

Most of our young Jews are not walking away because they are dissatisfied with Judaism. Most have never had the opportunity to choose...It's important to reach out to them and give them a chance to see the beauty of our heritage. The most important thing is to not turn them off. There is no such thing as losing in outreach.

Rabbi Harold Kushner

We have to face the prospect that a significant number of Jewish young people will marry someone of a different religious background. It is almost never a repudiation of their Jewish identity. It happens. So what are we going to do about it?

The single most important thing we can do is learn to see intermarriage as a doorway that leads into Judaism not a doorway that leads out. This is so obvious that you wonder why it isn't being done?...Too many of us tend to respond to intermarried families who had the courage to step over the threshold of the community with the unspoken response: "These are the people who are undermining the Jewish future." We feel berated, angry and threatened by intermarrying Jews and therefore do not know how to embrace them. Not surprisingly, they in turn feel terribly vulnerable to being judged. Sometimes outreach will express itself in conversion...and sometimes a person will not be able to choose Judaism for their own but at least we can provide the gravitational force for their sense of Jewish living, observance and ambience.

Dru Greenwood

Outreach in its essence means enabling growth a transformative change...It necessities the crossing of boundaries and happens in the mysterious grey areas in ways that are rarely straightforward or predictable.

Professor Frances D. Horowitz

From everything we know about identity formation and child development, when intermarried couples decide to expose their children to different cultural/religious contexts with the idea of "letting them choose" or to be free from having to choose anything at all, the likelihood is that these positions are psychologically naive at best and emotionally disruptive at worst. The problems are often compounded by developmental changes that take place in the parents themselves--with one or both parents sometimes being drawn more closely and unpredictably to their own cultural and religious background...Professionals concerned with outreach therefore ought to focus upon programs and activities they can mount that are developmentally appropriate to the children and families involved.

Rabbi "Yitz" Greenberg

The shock of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, it shorthand "52% intermarriage," is a reflection of the fact that open society has arrived. The ecological problem of an open society is that every Jew, before we are done will be a "Jew-by- choice." This is, by now, close to cliche. But although people now say it, we have not yet come to grips with its implication in our behaviors or communal patterns.

The issue is not conversion or intermarriage or outreach. Rather it is the redesign of every institution so that we convey a distinct and powerful message that is able to win the respect of our people.

Rabbi Alan Silverstein

We have to be a welcoming community that offers a sense of belonging and openness and inclusiveness.

We have to empower Jewish family members to be able to discuss with non-Jewish family members a positive view of entering the Jewish community. We need it provide user-friendly information because at present both Jews and non-Jews have a common lack of understanding how you go about the process if joining the Jewish community and the Jewish people.

We have to provide a multitude of venues to facilitate people grappling with Jewish study, Jewish observance and sincere conversion into Judaism. We have to promote Jewish continuity by unifying the religious lives of people.

Lydia Kukoff

We must remember that it's important for people to have the exposure through which they can build positive Jewish memories. Those associations can be built through programs that make it possible for people to develop their Jewish memory banks as adults or at whatever point of development they are.