3000 Celebrate Yom Kippur

Over 1500 people squeezed into the pews, aisles, and stairways of Memorial Church Sunday night to attend Conservative services for the Yom Kippur holiday.

Later in the evening 1000 more people attended Reform services, and at the Roscoe Pound Building, 350 Jews attended the Orthodox services.

The large attendence is part of a trend that has seen the number of Jews attending Yom Kippur services at Harvard double in the last six years, Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold, director of Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, said yesterday.

In his sermon Sunday, Gold said Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War triggered a new Jewish consciousness and a new era in Jewish history which he called "the post-assimilationist era."

Jews with the new consciousness share "an affirmation of Jewishness, and a rejection of assimilationism as harmful," Gold said. But he stressed that it was time for Jews to reject the feeling "that our Jewishness is separate and apart from our being Americans."

Robert D. Posner, programming assistant at Hillel, said yesterday that Hillel societies have been doing very well on campuses across the country.

At last month's freshman dinner for the Sabbath, Hillel coordinators expected 75 people and 120 attended, Posner said. "It extends back into high schools, where the youth groups are running full force," he said.

Several people waiting on the steps for services were skeptical of the import of the turnout and spoke of "high holy day Jews" attending religious ceremonies for the only time this year. Posner, however, said he believed the characterization was true of only a third of those attending.

The services were attended by many people from outside the Harvard community. "Harvard services have built up a reputation for being really nice on the holidays," Joel Fishman, a Brandeis student attending the services, said yesterday.