An anti-war letter sent to President Bush yesterday by the Union for Reform Judaism has ignited a furor among some Reform Jews who say they support American policy in Iraq and the statement is not representative of Jewish opinion.

The letter, a copy of which was sent to members of Congress last week, alerts the president to a resolution the union passed at its Biennial General Assembly last month in Houston. The resolution calls for a “clear exit strategy” from Iraq that includes specific troop withdrawals after the parliamentary elections on December 15. The statement also condemns the use of torture and abuse of prisoners and detainees, demands more transparency from the Bush administration, and calls for the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate administration failures before and during the war.

The letter to President Bush, signed by the union’s president, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, and its chairman, Robert Heller, claims the Iraq war had to the “discrediting of America in the international community” and contributed “to the growth of terrorism.”

Several Jewish leaders, including Reform rabbis, swiftly rebuked the letter yesterday.

A rabbi of a Reform synagogue in Danbury, Conn., Clifford Librach, said the letter “amplifies the extraordinary alienation from Israel and Israel’s security on the part of the American Reform elite.”

“There may be a majority of American Reform Jews who are currently opposed to this war under any circumstances,” Rabbi Librach said, “but the role of leadership is not to rubberstamp misguided popular opinion. The new peace process in Israel has advanced in part because Iraq has been neutralized and removed from the equation.”

The Union for Reform Judaism claims it represents 1.5 million North American members of the Reform movement. More than 2,000 delegates from more than 500 congregations voted on the resolution on November 18, the group said.

In response to the resolution and letter to the president, the Republican Jewish Coalition is buying full page newspaper advertisements criticizing the union. The ad features an Iraqi woman holding up her purple ink stained finger, indicating she voted in the last election. “The recent statement by the Union for Reform Judaism saying American Jews oppose the president on Iraq is misleading and wrong,” the ad reads in part.

More than 150 people are listed as signatories, including a former White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, and several elected officials and prominent rabbis.

One signatory, the longtime senior rabbi of the Stephen E.Wise Temple in Los Angeles, Isaiah Zeldin, said the union had stepped over the line.

“They surely don’t represent me, nor do they represent my congregation,” Rabbi Zeldin, whose Reform synagogue is one of the largest in America, with 3,500 congregants, said. The union was wrong to take a collective stance on the war, he said. “I think that the union has a right, indeed an obligation, to speak out on various issues. But in this one, we happen to be divided,” Rabbi Zeldin said.

Another Reform rabbi, Jon Haddon of Shearith Israel in Ridgefield, Conn., said the union had “moved too far to the left.”

“I do feel that they kind of came out with a harsh, blanket statement of the president’s policy in Iraq, and I just don’t buy it 100%,” Rabbi Haddon said. “I believe a democracy in the Middle East besides Israel is good for the Middle East and good for the world. If that could be accomplished, it would be a blessing for the world.”

A former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, James Tisch, said he thinks the Reform movement should focus its attention on spirituality, not politics. “I’m a member of the Reform movement because of the religion, not their political stands,” he said.

Mr. Tisch said he found particularly outrageous the part of the letter in which the Reform leaders wrote, “Respectfully but firmly, Mr. President, we want our leaders to tell us the truth.”

Said Mr. Tisch, “Who do they think they are?”

The union responded to the criticism yesterday in a statement, saying the Republican Jewish Coalition’s ad was “predictable and misleading.” The union’s chairman, Robert Heller, defended the resolution as “the result of weeks of rigorous debate among rabbis and lay leaders in our Movement.”

The group’s president, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, said, “Although no single opinion can adequately express the views of all members of Reform Movement congregations, we are proud of our representative democratic process and reaffirm our position as one that is timely, sensitive, and nuanced.”

Some Jewish leaders and observers said they were not surprised by the union’s resolution.

“It’s not out of character for the Reform Movement to take a position that is consistent with broad liberal sentiments in American political culture,” the director of international affairs at the American Jewish Congress, David Twersky, said. Mr. Twersky is also a contributing editor of The New York Sun. “They’ve been doing it for many, many decades – often to their honor and their credit.”

According to the Union’s Web site, it was the first religious organization to oppose the Vietnam War, passing two resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire in that conflict, the first in 1965.

The president of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein, had harsher words for the Reform union’s resolution on Iraq, calling its suggestion for a timetable for troop withdrawal “sheer folly” and “dangerous for both Israel and America.”

“To demand an exit strategy before victory in Iraq is as unwise as trying to have had one during World War II,” Mr. Klein said. “It would only embolden the enemy by telling them ‘We’re losing, so we’re leaving.'”

In New York, some Reform rabbis said they supported the union’s resolution, and that it was representative of American Jewish opinion.

“Most Jews do support the letter and the spirit of that statement,” the rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side, Ammiel Hirsch, said.

The rabbi of the East End Temple on 17th Street, David Adelson, said he was “proud to belong to a religious movement which demands that we face the serious issues which confront us.”