The custom of reciting Kaddish for one’s deceased close relatives, and the other memorial customs developed in medieval Ashkenaz, became so deeply rooted in Jewish culture and personal observance that there was never any thought of attenuating most of them in the modern world. In fact, the prayer book of the earliest ongoing Reform congregation (Hamburg, 1819) elaborates on the Mourner’s Kaddish in such a way as to actually make it a mourner’s prayer for the dead. Borrowing from the Spanish-Portuguese Sefardic memorial rite (Hashkavah) and the Ashkenazic burial Kaddish,2 the Hamburg prayer book added the following paragraph (in Aramaic):

This paragraph (sometimes with minor alterations) was taken over into virtually every Reform prayer book in Europe and North America up to the second half of the twentieth century. It figures prominently in all editions of the Union Prayer Book, though most Reform Jews were not capable of reciting it in Aramaic. (Often, the English paraphrase, “The departed whom we now remember have entered into the peace of life eternal . . .” would be substituted at this point.) Chaim Stern, in Gates of Prayer (1975), eliminated it entirely, restoring the traditional text of the Mourner’s Kaddish (the text that was known to those Reform Jews who had come from a more traditional upbringing).

In the Hamburg prayer book, the Kaddish is introduced by another Hebrew paragraph, taken from the Spanish-Portuguese Sefardic Hashkavah ritual that draws on a variety of talmudic texts as follows:

This is the first instance in a Reform prayer book of what would become the meditation, or series of meditations, in the vernacular before the Kaddish.