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March 19, 2021 11:30 am
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Who Should Decide Who’s Jewish in Israel?

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avatar by Jeremy Rosen

Opinion

Reading from a Torah scroll in accordance with Sephardi tradition. Photo: Sagie Maoz via Wikimedia Commons.

Why is there such a fuss over the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to allow converts to Judaism, as defined by the Reform and Conservative movements, to qualify for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return? It makes no sense to me at all. It is a conflation of two quite separate issues — the civil law of the State of Israel, and the religious definition of Jewish identity.

The Law of Return was passed unanimously by the Knesset in July 1950, to give anyone persecuted as a Jew, the right to come and live in Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship.

It was motivated by the way the world turned its back on Jews, especially during the fist half of the 20th century. The so-called civilized nations had closed the doors to Jewish refugees. Israel wanted to ensure that never again would Jews die because they had no homeland or a place that would guarantee their safety. This was not a religious law. It was a humanitarian one.

In 1962, Brother Daniel, a Carmelite monk living in Israel, asked the Supreme Court to recognize him as Jewish under the Law of Return. The court rejected his application on the grounds that conversion out of the faith constituted a rejection of Jewish identity. On the other hand, in 1970, Benny Schalit successfully sued to register his two sons as Jewish by citizenship even though his wife was not Jewish.

After the Soviets lifted the ban on Jewish emigration to Israel, in 1971 the Supreme Court extended the right of return to people with one Jewish grandparent, a person who was married to a Jew, whether or not he or she was considered religiously Jewish, as well as someone who had converted (without specifying by whom). This was to accommodate the many Russians that the Soviets had labeled as Jews ethnically, but not religiously.

The result was that there are now hundreds of thousands of former Russian Israeli citizens, who are not technically Jewish religiously. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that conversions performed outside of Israel were valid for the Law of Return (regardless of whether they were Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform).

Looking at the Jews of the world today, we see plainly that there are many different ways of defining, or self-recognizing, as Jewish. And good luck, I say. The more the merrier.

The Chief Rabbinate in Israel, as a state institution, defines a Jew solely in Orthodox Religious terms. It only recognizes Orthodox conversions, and refuses to recognize the Reform and Conservative movements. They have even started to annul conversions, sometimes by Orthodox rabbis, where they thought the acting rabbi was being too tolerant. And it’s become an issue of political turf warfare as much as bureaucracy.

All of this has added uncertainty to the situation on the ground. The Neeman Commission, which was set up by the Knesset in 2005 to try to resolve the issue, got nowhere thanks to the intransigence of the Chief Rabbinate and its political supporters. And increasing agitation by Reform and Conservative Jews for recognition within a dominant Orthodox society has added fuel to the fire and raised other issues of Jewish identity.

It was because of the failure of the Chief Rabbinate to act that the Supreme Court intervened, and on March 1, 2021, ruled that Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel are valid with regard to the Law of Return.

This issue is only about civil secular law, and is not intended to have any religious consequences or to interfere with the right of the Chief Rabbinate to decide matters of Jewish religious personal status. But it has had the effect of increasing the resentment in Israel towards the religious authorities in many sectors of the population. And it goes to the issue of the separation of state and religion.

Israel today, following Ottoman law, only recognizes marriages within religious communities, be they Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. There is no civil marriage. However, Israelis can marry civilly abroad (Cyprus is a near and easy option) and are recognized as married by civil law in Israel. The problem often comes when someone who wants to get married under the Rabbinate finds that it does not accept him or her as Jewish for religious ceremonials.

The only way to resolve all of this is to scrap the stranglehold that the Rabbinate has over personal status. Why not allow freedom of choice and status?

The politicization of religion, in the long run, only damages religion. Sadly, only a total overhaul of the political system can bring about change, and this is unlikely, as the history of the past 70 years has shown.

The argument that this will undermine the Jewish identity of the country makes no sense. What defines the state, its ceremonies, its Jewish calendar, and the Declaration of Independence will not change.  Those who want to live a religious life will not be prevented from doing so any more than those who want to leave Israel altogether are being prevented.

It is true that assimilation in the Diaspora is easier and more common. But this has not prevented those who wish to live the most intense Haredi Judaism from being in any way disadvantaged or causing their numbers to dwindle. Quite the contrary; they are thriving.

It is consent, negotiation, compromise, and positive factors rather than negative ones that are the way forward. Compulsion never succeeds in the long run. This is the kind of spat that gives religion and politics a bad name.

The author is a writer and rabbi currently living in New York.

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