Orthodox Union

The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (UOJCA), more popularly known as the Orthodox Union, or OU, is one of the oldest Orthodox Jewish organizations in the United States. It is best known for its kosher supervision service, with the circled-U symbol found on the labels of many commercial and consumer food products.

The OU supports a network of synagogues, youth programs, Jewish and Religious Zionist advocacy, programs for the disabled, localized religious study programs, and some international units with locations in Israel and Ukraine.

It is one of the largest Jewish Orthodox organizations in the United States. Its synagogues, and the rabbis who lead them, are mostly part of the world of Modern Orthodox Judaism.

This organization should not be confused with the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, a distinct Haredi rabbinical group with a similar name that was founded a few years after the OU.

History
The OU was founded in 1898, and today serves almost 1,000 congregations of varying size. The need for a national Jewish Orthodox rabbinical organization in the early twentieth century was recognized by a number of groups. The Union of Orthodox Rabbis was the most powerful rabbinical body at that time and many of its members saw the great value in establishing the early Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.

Originally, the OU was formed by leaders of the Jewish Theological Seminary, with the charter coming from its headquarters in New York City, where it had been located since 1886. The first cracks between the OU and JTS formed in 1902, with the founding of the Agudah Harobonim, exactly 100 days after Solomon Schechter's arrival from Great Britain to lead JTS. The Agudah refused to recognize the credentials of those ordained at JTS, thus fragmenting Orthodox Judaism from Conservative Judaism. (See American Judaism by Jonathan Sarna.) However,the OU was still officially related to JTS until the 1950's. The break between Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism really rose with the Sabbath decision of 1949. This groundbreaking decision, allowing both congregants and rabbis to drive to shul on the sabbath if they lived too far to walk, severed the otherwise rather homogeneous group into what would become two distinct groups. However, even after the formal division, many Jews in the 1950's continued to identify themselves as orthodox even while driving on the sabbath and many Jews were members of two synagogues.

Some Orthodox rabbis viewed the nascent OU as insufficiently Orthodox, and thus did not participate in it, instead setting up their own more stringent rabbinical organizations. However, the idea for a national Orthodox congregational body took hold, and soon developed into the OU that exists today. The OU grew slowly until the 1950s, when it then began increasing the number of affiliated congregations (most of them small, but many of them of a large size.) Additionally, the 1950s brought cheese production under increased scrutiny which enabled the OU to create a kashrut division focusing on this. This increased revenue for the OU, but also became a defining line in orthodox Jewish observance that was not something Jews in American previously considered.

Most synagogues affiliated with the Orthodox Union were under the leadership of rabbis trained by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and alumni from Yeshiva University's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. These rabbis were ideologically Modern Orthodox. However, in the past 20 years, with the Modern Orthodox move towards the right (prompted by an increase in post-high school study in Israel and a desire of people to follow their "rebbes," the OU has become much more right wing. Many rabbis in the OU wear black hats and even send their sons to Nar Yisroel or other Kollels.  The question exists in years to come whether the OU itself will transform even more into a bastion of Orthodoxy, not Modern Orthodoxy.

Activities
The OU plays a significant role in supervising kosher foods. When a company elects to produce a kosher product, rabbis hired by the OU are dispatched to inspect the production line to ensure that the product complies with halacha (Jewish law). As the laws of Kashrus are quite complicated, Jews keeping strictly kosher will only use products that have rabbinical supervision. Once the product's ingredients and production are deemed to be kosher, the company may use the OU symbol, allowing Jews keeping kosher to find it. Led by the current CEO, Menachem Genack, it is the best-known hechsher (kosher supervision agency) in the world and among the most widely accepted. In 2005 over 60% of kosher foods in the US are supervised by the OU, encompassing more than 275,000 products from over 2,400 manufacturers, produced in nearly 6,000 plants in 77 countries. For its food supervision arm the OU has hired mostly Haredi and even Hasidic rabbis known as mashgichim (kosher food supervisors). Although there is considerable cost involved in kosher production, companies producing kosher foods consider the potential financial benefit from an increased demand for their products by kosher consumers in addition to those who are already using their products.

The OU requires that all member synagogues follow Orthodox Jewish interpretations of Jewish law and tradition. Men and women are seated separately, and nearly always are separated by a mechitza, a physical divider between the men's and women's section of the synagogue. OU synagogues follow Religious Zionism, meaning that they support the existence of the State of Israel. The laws of Shabbat (the Sabbath) and Kashrut are stressed. Members of OU synagogues have a diverse political background, and are not necessarily members of any one political party. Orthodox Jews are somewhat more politically conservative than non-observant Jews. They daven exclusively in Hebrew, using the same traditional text of the siddur (prayer book) that has been used in Ashkenazi Jewish communities for the last few centuries. Until recently the most common prayerbook used in OU synagogues have been Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem edited by Philip Birnbaum. In recent years the most common siddur has been the RCA edition of the Artscroll siddur, a prayerbook that is identical to the regular Artscroll siddur, but for the addition of a new preface, and prayers for the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces. Until recently the most common Hebrew-English Humash used has been the Pentateuch and Haftarahs, edited by Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz; in recent years this has been supplanted by The Chumash: The Stone Edition, also known as the Artscroll Chumash.

The official youth program of the OU is the National Conference of Synagogue Youth known as NCSY. It sponsors the Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists. NCSY, originally created to reach out to non-orthodox Jews, has now become a refuge for many yeshiva children who otherwise do not associate with members of the opposite sex to become friends. In New Jersey, over 80% of the youth groups members are yeshiva kids. In Florida this became such an issue, that there are now officially two regions: one for public school students and one for yeshiva kids. In recent years, NCSY has had trouble recruiting public school youth because of a variety of scandals and far too right wing advisers. Additionally because it had a reputation for being for lost souls. Often the adviser population (taken mostly from YU students who have spent at least one year studying in Israel)is far more right wing than the Modern Orthodox movement standards for. This causes many attendees to feel disenchanted by the group. However, many marriages have resulted from the social interaction. In fact, NCSY boasts that 95% of their members marry Jews. In the past, many regional administrators and advisers typically dated younger NCSY high school students. Now because of scandals, this is discouraged.

For many years the OU, along with its related rabbinic arm, the Rabbinical Council of America, worked with the larger Jewish community in the Synagogue Council of America. In this group Orthodox, Conservative and Reform groups worked together on many issues of joint concern. The group became defunct in 1994, mainly over the objections of the Orthodox groups to Reform Judaism's official acceptance of patrilineal descent as an option for defining Jewishness. (See Who is a Jew.)

In 2005, the Orthodox Union again faced controversy because of an undercover video that documented animals at a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa being shocked in the face with electric prods and slaughtered in an extremely cruel manner. The investigation was the subject of multiple stories in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and all of the Jewish media. In 2006, the OU’s defense of what the President of the Conservative Movement and the USDA called “egregious violations” of Federal law, were the subject of a video narrated by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and Rabbis Irving Greenberg and David Wolpe.

Division from other groups
Note on division of JTS from Orthodox/neo-Orthodox to Conservative: The JTS has a policy of using critical-historical scholarship to analyze religious practices and texts. Traditional Torah study allows critical thinking, but does not allow revisionism, nor the suggestion of non-divine origins. It also places strictures on contradicting or overturning accepted scholarship. Thus, JTS practices were always seen as heretical by most Orthodox rabbis. As the JTS form of scholarship evolved to the Masorti way of today, this view became universal among Orthodox Jews. Today, this has led to a nearly complete split of Orthodoxy from Conservative, and further underlies the OU's leaving the Synagogue Council.