The Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism (The Columbus Platform)

The Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism, generally known as the Columbus Platform, was adopted by the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1937 in Columbus, Ohio. Against the rise of Nazism in Germany and a large wave of Eastern European immigration that did not share the founding generation's assumptions, it repudiated the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform's rejection of Zionism, affirming Reform Judaism's stake in the rebuilding of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, and reopened space for ceremonial and traditional practice the earlier platform had treated as no longer binding. As the movement's own adopted text, it is the primary source for what Reform Judaism itself declared at that date, distinct from how individual congregations later implemented it. Use it for the documented reversal of the Pittsburgh Platform's position on Jewish peoplehood and Zion; the 1999 Statement of Principles is the further, later step in the same documented direction.