A group of prominent Conservative rabbis and a handful of lay leaders will meet in New York this week to weigh several proposals to revise the movement’s views on homosexuality.

The 30-member law committee of the centrist Jewish movement will study several position papers to be presented at a two-day gathering, beginning tomorrow at Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan. Among the proposals being considered: repealing the prohibition of homosexual relations, encouraging “reparative therapy” to help gays and lesbians live as heterosexuals, opening the rabbinate to gays and lesbians while keeping in place a ban on anal sex, and upholding the movement’s current stance, which prohibits homosexuals from holding religious and educational leadership positions.

The executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Jerome Epstein, told The New York Sun in a telephone interview that the law committee, of which he is a member, would probably adopt two conflicting proposals — one supporting increased inclusion of gays and lesbians, and another preserving the status quo. The United Synagogue, an association of more than 750 North American congregations is already devising a strategy to “stay unified in the face of diversity,” of opinions on this issue, Rabbi Epstein said.

In recent years, the ordination of gays and lesbians has emerged as one of the most polarizing issues in the Conservative movement — a shrinking denomination that now accounts for about one-third of affiliated American Jews. While some Conservative Jews contend that lifting the ban is a matter of embracing civil rights and modernity, others insist that doing so is a clear violation of Jewish law, or “halacha.”

The spiritual leader of Congregation Or Zarua on the Upper East Side, Rabbi Harlan Wechsler, yesterday said he hoped the law committee would come out strongly against ordaining gays and lesbians. “Ordination to the rabbinate isn’t for everyone,” he told The New York Sun. “It’s only for people willing to take on a traditional Jewish lifestyle based on the laws of the Torah and the rabbinic interpreters. Rabbis need to take it upon themselves to be models of that type of behavior.”

Of a proposal allowing homosexual ordination while banning anal sex, Rabbi Wechsler said, “I don’t think it’s realistic.”

By contrast, Rabbi Carie Carter of the Park Slope Jewish Center in Brooklyn said she hoped the committee — composed of 25 voting rabbis, and five lay leaders, who do not vote — would “come to a decision that allows for their ordination, and that would really celebrate the lives of these gay Jews.”

Passing contradictory “responsas,” as the legal rulings are called, could impel the Jewish Theological Seminary, the movement’s flagship institution, to revisit its ban on ordaining gay and lesbian rabbis. This and other related developments were reported in the December 1 issue of the New York Jewish Week.

The seminary’s incoming chancellor, Arnold Eisen, has called a faculty meeting for Thursday. Mr. Eisen, who has said he personally supports ordaining gays and lesbians, has vowed to include students, faculty, trustees, and members of Conservative congregations nationwide before deciding whether to admit homosexuals into its rabbinic and cantorial programs. The seminary’s immediate past chancellor Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, who was on the job for 20 years, has long been an opponent of ordaining gays and lesbians.

A member of Keshet, a group that advocates for “social and religious equality for Jews of all sexual orientations” and a second-year rabbinical student at JTS, Eytan Hammerman, said it’s high time Conservative Judaism reversed its ban on gays in the rabbinate — much like the movement changed to allow the ordination of women more than 20 years ago. “Jewish law has never stood still,” he said. “It’s constantly evolving and changing. We think that that the movement will be strengthened, not weakened, by the complete inclusion of lesbians and gays.”

Mr. Hammerman said his mother and grandmother would sit in the back of the bus as a sign of solidarity with blacks during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, and that standing up for the Conservative movement’s homosexual would-be rabbis is “a contemporary version of that.”