Gerald Sorin in his book Tradition Transformed states that the Jewish immigrant experience in America was such that while Jewish traditions from Europe were challenged by such things as American mobility, individualism, and secularism, the ultimate outcome was not the destruction of tradition but its transformation. Sorin is correct that these traditions have been transformed rather than destroyed. A purist might argue that traditions have to be maintained in a precise fashion or they are destroyed, but that would ignore the vitality that traditions gain through evolution so that they not only link the individual to the past and to a community but also bind together the community that exists in the here-and-now, allowing that community to address current issues and to give its members a grounding in their history at the same time.
Some immigrant groups made changes more quickly than others. The Eastern European Jews changed the face of Judaism in America in a hurry:
In 1881 only a tiny minority of the two hundred major synagogues in the United States were Orthodox. As early as 1890, after decade of mass immigration, the majority of synagogues adhered to the traditional service, and by 1910, 90 percent of more than two thousand synagogues called themselves Orthodox (129).
While some might have seen this as the end of a way of life, in fact it was an affirmation of faith:
Jewish piety never fully dissipated, but in individualistic America it did soften, and many Jews, even some only recently observant, gradually drifted into a secular mode of life. Those who remained pious faced great difficulties in America (130).
Yet, true to America's zeal for accommodation, Orthodox leaders searched for ways to be of service to their communities and accommodate modernity without sacrificing the sacred:
Several Orthodox synagogues designed to serve "modern" young Jewish adults were established in uptown New York, as was the n...