Origins.

Reform Judaism emerged from the experience of European Jews and made its first major impact in the United States when German immigrants began to arrive in the mid 1840s. The tiny American Jewish population of the time identified with traditional Judaism, but it had little trained leadership and scant contact with European Jewry. Demands for reform accelerated as German Jewish immigrants began to form new synagogues all across the country. At the heart of the movement was an emphasis on rationality and the moral aspects of religion and a deemphasis on the supernatural and inherited ritual. Two major figures dominated the Reform movement, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and Rabbi David Einhorn. Wise was the movement's main organizer, while Einhorn was its radical theoretician. Wise's agenda for reform focused on those dietary restrictions and ritual practices that visibly set Jews apart from their neighbors...