Who We Are

The ACC, through its support for and cultivation of excellence among cantors, strengthens Reform Jewish life in North America. ACC cantors are equipped to be attentive to the joys and challenges that members within a congregation face over the course of their lives, using both their unique calling to music and prayer and their shared responsibilities for offering spiritual leadership to congregations. ACC members also can help lead their congregations and by extension, the Reform Jewish movement in North America, to a bright future.

The ACC maintains rigorous standards for ordination/certification, offers deep support for the professional needs of cantors, advocates with passion for the evolving role of the cantorial vocation, and cultivates ever-increasing professional excellence among its members.

Committed. Sacred. Strong. Beautiful. Forward-Facing.

• Committed. The ACC as a professional benefits organization is strongly committed to its members, the Reform movement and the movement’s affiliated organizations. To its members it pledges advocacy, professional support, camaraderie and training. To the movement it pledges support and participation in the movement’s efforts to repair the world and to the movement’s affiliated organizations, it pledges cooperation and partnership.
• Sacred. The cantorial vocation is fundamentally a sacred calling, and the ACC’s work has a sacred quality to it. The ACC is more than a professional benefits organization or a labor union. It is an organization that, through its members, advocates, designs, facilitates and hosts sacred time and space within Jewish life.
• Strong. The ACC is equipped to lead in uncertain times, both the movement and the congregations it serves. 
• Beautiful. The ACC and its members help bring beauty into the world, through music, prayer, and the pastoral gift of being present to members in life’s joyful and sad moments. 
• Forward-Facing. The ACC takes bold steps to meet today’s challenges and ensure a bright future for cantors, congregations, and the Reform movement in North America.

ACC Mission Statement

The American Conference of Cantors supports its members in their sacred calling as emissaries for Judaism and for Jewish music. ACC leadership draws upon the energies and aspirations of its individual members, while responding to the expressed needs of the larger membership and the Reform Movement. The Conference inspires its members to embrace a shared dynamic vision of the cantorate. This vision is realized through programs and initiatives that will ensure a strong and successful organization. Each such effort is conceived according to carefully determined goals and criteria. Through our members we provide our communities with a compelling experience of text, music, learning, relationship to one another and connectedness to God. We establish our organization as a self-assured and securely funded entity, acting in full partnership with other representational bodies of the Reform Movement and worldwide Jewry.

Guiding Principles

Accountability ... Alignment ... Empowerment ... Wholeness ... Truth

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