About a month ago, the rabbi at Joshua Rudin's Conservative synagogue in Peabody, Mass., startled him during a membership meeting with a side conversation. "Want to go to Baltimore to learn about how Conservative Judaism should deal with intermarried families?" Mr. Rudin said he was asked. Mr. Rudin went home and talked it over with his wife. "I realized that personally we knew 10 intermarried families, including three of my cousins," he said. "We have an 18-month-old, and in parenting classes we met intermarried families. It was eye-opening."

That's how he found himself among 14 other Jewish men at the Pikesville Hilton from March 18-20 for the latest gathering of the Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs on the topic - meetings that FJMC leaders hope will create a revolution of sorts within the Conservative movement.

The goal is to gather small groups of receptive rabbis for a few days and have overlapping meetings with volunteer leaders. That, goes the theory, will create a base to force the movement's Rabbinical Assembly and other arms to be more welcoming of interfaith families.

"We see this old guard that doesn't want to change and some of us who make no bones about it. We tell them we're going to take you dragging and kicking into the 21st century," said Dan Stern, president of the FJMC and a member of Beth Israel Congregation in Owings Mills. "We bring in the rabbis we can work with. Over time, as this thing mushrooms in the movement, we'll have success stories."

But he and the others have a tricky balancing act. The Conservative movement is a halachic one, meaning it adheres to Jewish law - albeit not the more rigid Orthodox interpretation. In fact, performing an intermarriage is one of the few things that can have a Conservative rabbi kicked out of the Rabbinical Association.

So at their meeting, the rabbis dug into religious issues such as the limits of non-Jews in a synagogue service and confronting the halachic impact of patrilineal descent - the Reform doctrine that declares a child Jewish if only the father is Jewish and the child is raised in a Jewish home.

Rabbi Stephen Weiss from B'nai Jeshurun Congregation near Cleveland welcomed the task.

"These issues are percolating from the ground up in our congregations," he said. "There's an increasing desire to draw intermarried families in deeper, make them feel welcome to build a Jewish life and raise Jewish children. ... The challenge for us is how we balance seeking to promote in-marriage and still be welcoming and open."

For her part, Rabbi Liebe Hoffman at Congregation Kol Ami in Annapolis said that at her synagogue, intermarried families are made to feel comfortable. Yet, she said she welcomed hearing how to deal with various situations.

"What is the language that we use to not reject but still maintain one's integrity?" she said. "If we refer to the non-Jew speaking as 'non-Jew,' that's negative. Thinking in new ways is very powerful."

Throughout their stay here, the volunteer leaders - who were hosted on Shabbat by Pikesville's Beth El Congregation and heard from Baltimore Hebrew University President Dr. Rela Mintz Geffen, co-author of a book on the Conservative movement - shared personal stories and frustrations, as well as learned how to replicate new programs in their home congregations.

Many seemed impressed with the San Francisco-area based Tiferet Project, which wants to call a non-Jewish spouse a Krov Yisrael, which can be translated from Hebrew as a "relative of an Israelite" or "one close to an Israelite."

"We acknowledge the tension of recognizing the reality of intermarriage and the desire for Jews to promote endogamy," said Tiferet director Rose Levinson. "There's an enormous amount of shame going along with being intermarried. I'm talking about the Jews. The number of people now who are Jewish and intermarried who won't go to a Conservative synagogue is about a bazillion."

Glen Massarano, also with the Tiferet Project, married a Jew. As such, he said he was stunned by the depth of emotion he heard in conversations with interfaith couples about their concerns.

"Some people say to these people, 'Why don't you just convert? You show up, you pay your dues. You're not Christian. Just convert,'" he said. "But they can't. They don't believe in God or whatever. But they have formally made that decision to raise Jewish children. It is clear that these people have chosen to throw in their lot with us."

The high stakes were not being glossed over.

"The bad news is, the way things are, there probably won't be a Conservative movement in 50 or 100 years," said Stephen Lachter, noting that the 2000 National Jewish Population Study saw the percentage of Conservative Jews slip below that of Reform ones. "The good news is that those of us in the Conservative movement have the power to change that."

Later, he added, "We are all Jews by choice. We make choices about our Judaism every day. It's not unusual that people move along. They take an introduction to Judaism course. They take a basic Hebrew course and then they convert to Judaism. That happens in our synagogue and I assume it happens elsewhere. You need to provide people with information. But you have to do it in a positive, effective way."