Ziegler announces seminary will remain Conservative, add focus on finance, technology
The goal of the program is no longer the number of students but the quality of students serving the modern community.
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Read the original article here: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/ziegler-announces-seminary-will-remain-conservative-add-focus-on-finance-technology/?utm_source=cio
The American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, it turns out, is staying in the Conservative fold — but with a dramatically revamped curriculum for the 2027-28 school year that stresses the real-world financial and technological skills that rabbis need to succeed in today’s market.
And, at a fraught moment in the Jewish community, the seminary is reaffirming its deep connection to Israel — though it says it will not impose a Zionist litmus test on its rabbis-to-be.
In announcing the changes exclusively to eJewishPhilanthropy, including that Ziegler admissions for next year are open as of today, AJU’s president, Jay Sanderson, said, “The school is going to continually evolve as the community needs to evolve. … There’s a gaping hole in the education rabbis need to get to lead synagogues and lead non-synagogues,” he said.
When Sanderson announced in January that Ziegler was pausing enrollment for the 2026-27, many in the Jewish world worried that the only Conservative seminary on the West Coast was considering going nondenominational or shuttering completely. He put those fears to rest last week, telling eJP: “As an institution and as Jewish people, we have to be honest with how we look at denominational life. We’re keeping our affiliation with the Conservative movement because of the depth and breadth of that education.”
Founded in 1996, Ziegler ordained its first class in 1999, but enrollment declined over the following decades, with only two students enrolling in 2021. To counteract the waning number, the seminary slashed tuition by 80% in 2022, which led to an uptick of incoming students into the double digits. Still, enrollment remained a concern for the school, a trend among all non-Orthodox rabbinic schools, causing what is referred to as “the rabbinic pipeline problem” — an abundance of congregations unable to find a rabbi to lead them.
Sanderson told eJP that seminaries, including Ziegler, have been paying attention to the wrong things — what makes a quality school isn’t the number of students enrolled, but the quality of graduates and their ability to serve the Jewish community.
“This will never be a profit generator,” Sanderson told eJP, about Ziegler. “It is a leadership generator.”
A November 2025 Atra study, “From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership,” revealed that new rabbis preferred non-pulpit roles over congregational roles, despite lower pay, because pulpit positions were considered far more emotionally taxing with blurred boundaries and unrealistic expectations. In Los Angeles, where Sanderson lives, the two most significant Jewish leadership roles are at the Jewish Federation Los Angeles and the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, and both positions are held by rabbis. “There’s a gaping hole in the education rabbis need to get to lead synagogues and lead non-synagogues,” he said. Ziegler’s curriculum is changing because the rabbinate is changing.
The school will remain connected to the Conservative movement, but the curriculum will be constantly in flux. It will continue to focus on Torah and religious study, but also include an emphasis on the financial and technological skills that modern rabbis need to succeed in today’s world.
The curriculum will include classes on strategic planning, financial management, fundraising and media and technology, including artificial intelligence. The school plans to eventually offer two master’s degrees, one for rabbinic education and one for organizational leadership. Jewish studies classes will be taught by Jewish educators, but all other courses will be taught by leaders in their fields.
The school will be in a state of fluidity, not even able to publish the full curriculum for the fall of 2027, given the fast pace of change, especially related to AI, Sanderson said. “The school is going to continually evolve as the community needs to evolve.”
When Sanderson was announced as president of AJU in May 2025, the board wanted him to shake things up. Prior to joining AJU, Sanderson served for 12 years as president and CEO of the Jewish Federation Los Angeles.
“I’m not an academic,” Sanderson said. “I’m not a rabbi. I have a deep Jewish education. I’m a Jewish communal leader, but I’ve run businesses. And what I understand about synagogue life, on top of nonprofits, is they are businesses. They have revenue. They have expenses. And rabbis may have executive directors, but they need to read a balance sheet. They need to be effective fundraisers, and they definitely need to embrace technology.”
In addition to the intertwining business and Torah, “our school is going to be a school that puts Israel in the forefront of what we do,” Sanderson said. “We’re going to deepen our education in Israel, and we are going to make sure that we are identifying and selecting candidates that understand the essential role Israel plays in the Jewish experience and should be playing in the rabbinate.”
Still, the decision about whether a candidate will study at the school will not be defined by their relationship to Zionism, he said. “The word Zionism has been co-opted, misunderstood. [If a student is chosen to study at Ziegler, it is] not about [their definition of] Zionism. It’s about Israel being a central part of what it means to be a Jew and the homeland of the Jewish people… At the end of the day, my Jewish identity has Israel in its core.”
Another revelation that came from the Atra study is that new clergy were increasingly being ordained at nondenominational schools, often chosen based on convenience, not ideology. On a mid-January episode of Jonah Platt’s “Being Jewish” podcast, which was taped in July 2025, Sanderson said he would like to see Ziegler go nondenominational.
Instead, the school will remain connected to the Conservative movement. “I just know, as a Jewish leader, and I know based on the curriculums of all the rabbinical schools, that the depth and breadth that we are teaching, and that and [the Conservative movement’s] Jewish Theological Seminary are teaching, allows any student to be able to lead services, lead a community at any non-Orthodox denomination, and I want our rabbinical students to have every option in the world to be great rabbis and great Jewish leaders,” Sanderson said.
While tuition currently costs $8,240 per year to attend, even that could change or disappear. Rabbinic schools that claim to charge $30,000 are rarely charging full tuition because they offer scholarships and financial aid, Sanderson said. “So it is a little bit of a misnomer that enrollment impacts the bottom line of rabbinic education.”
Other professional schools have fellowships to incentivize students, and the same needs to be done for rabbinical students as fewer young Jews want to become rabbis or serve as Jewish professionals, Sanderson said.
“We as a Jewish community also have to be honest: a generation ago [the rabbinate was] a field that young young Jews wanted to go into,” he said. “We have to figure out how we build up the pipeline — and some of that might be financial incentives — some of that might be models where the education is free, and in turn, maybe the rabbinical students in the future work for a year for the institution that ordains them.”
To make up for the lack of tuition, Ziegler would turn to donors. “In all the conversations I’m having with my friends who run foundations and with other major philanthropists, they’re deeply concerned about the future of the rabbinate,” Sanderson said. “They’re deeply concerned about the future of synagogue life, and so if we can make a compelling case that we are creating a school of the highest excellence, where we are looking for the select few who are going to not just be rabbis, they’re going to be the next generation of great rabbis in North America, I believe philanthropic dollars will follow.”
Becoming a rabbi is costly. The Atra study also showed that 66% of current rabbinical students are entering the field after leaving another career. To attend an in-person program, students need to stop working, pay tuition and live in an expensive city. Then they enter a field that does not pay that well, Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, the executive director of Atra, who supports Ziegler and other schools across the non-Haredi spectrum with their work, told eJP. Because of this, rethinking tuition is a focus of Atra’s work with seminaries.
In January, when Sanderson announced the pause in applications, he announced that Ziegler’s longtime dean, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, was leaving his current role — while staying on at the university as the Mordecai Kaplan Distinguished Scholar. A new dean is not planned to be announced in the near future, Sanderson said.
The changes are inspired by a Zeigler-commissioned independent review that included interviews with students, faculty, administrators, alumni, lay leaders and prominent Jewish communal leaders. While the full results will not be completed until November, Sanderson said, the school has learned enough to know the direction to pivot. “We decided not to wait until the study was done because I don’t believe we can wait to restart the rabbinical school because the Jewish community is in crisis.”
Results from the review already affirmed that the school’s business model was failing and that the rabbinic school needed to do more than just teach Torah; it needed to teach rabbis to lead in today’s world. There needs to be a push to bring in the highest-achieving students who have already shown leadership qualities, Sanderson said, and want to “become part of a rabbinic school because they want to be a part of the future of the Jewish people.”
The components that make a successful seminary are for an institution to know “who it is, what it stands for, what its theology and philosophy is” while being “willing to make the hard and necessary changes to deal with the conditions and the opportunities,” Epstein said.
While Ziegler is making a bet on the direction to take, other seminaries are making different choices, Epstein said, “but making strong choices, testing them, trying them and being willing and wanting to change if it turns out that the needs are different are necessary ingredients for success.”
Sanderson hopes that the changes in the school are forcing a larger conversation in the Jewish world that things need to change. “We have to recognize that we have a challenge on the back end,” he said. “Many potential rabbinic students look at the jobs that they could get, and they are questioning whether that’s the life they want. We have to look at work-life balance in the rabbinate. We have to look at pay in the rabbinate.”
A strong community needs strong leaders, Sanderson said, and “if we want great Jewish professionals and great rabbis, they have to want the jobs.”
Read the original article here: https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/ziegler-announces-seminary-will-remain-conservative-add-focus-on-finance-technology/?utm_source=cio