The functionaries who headed the Bureau sought to minimize differences with the Orthodox. They hoped, among others, to refute the opposing party's claim that they constituted a separate religion. The Hungarian government accepted their stance and recognized the communal associations only as "fractions" (), stressing that all three belonged "one and the same denomination" (). The Neolog leadership adopted a careful line in matters of faith and practice. Leopold Löw, who became increasingly independent in the 1860s, slid toward Geiger's positions and even boycotted the Congress, demonstrating sympathy for the Orthodox. He became estranged from the lay establishment of the Bureau. David Philipson, in his 1907 history of the Reform movement, wrote on the different factions in Hungarian Jewry: "religiously they are practically on the same footing. Religious Reform as conceived in Germany and realized in the United States is unknown." The 1911 Central Conference of American Rabbis' Year Book noted with disappointment: "in the Szegedin and Budapest reform temples, there are no mixed choirs, no family pews, no bareheaded praying and not even confirmation of boys and girls. As to the contents of the prayers themselves, they are the same as the Orthodox have." When Theodor Herzl's confirmation took place in 1873, his family had to hold it at home rather than in the Dohány Street Synagogue. The only Hungarian rabbi in the decades to come who administered some of the ritual changes proposed by Geiger was Ede Neumann, who served in Nagykanizsa from 1883 to 1918. Another attempt for more radical innovations was made by the Pesth layman Ernő Naményi, who founded the Isaiah Religious Association () in the early 1930s. They held services inspired by Einhorn's 1848 group in private homes, which included prayers in Hungarian. The local congregation never allowed them to formally organize. In 1932, when Lily Montagu visited Budapest on behalf of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, she met several lay leaders but no Neolog rabbi attended for, as written by Raphael Patai, they "were all Conservative and hence opposed in principle to Liberal or Reform Judaism".