An Israeli government proposal to recognize only Orthodox conversions in the Jewish state has ignited a barrage of protests by U.S. Conservative and Reform groups.
Liberal U.S. Jewish groups say a proposal that allows the rabbinate’s recognition only of Orthodox conversions locally in fact delegitimizes Conservative and Reform conversions worldwide — and effectively denies the status of most American Jews.
But Israel’s S.F.-based consul general for the Pacific Northwest said this week that the proposed bill, which is only in the discussion stage, would do no such thing.
“It makes a statement only as to conversions carried out in the state of Israel,” said Consul General Nimrod Barkan.
“The changes will apply only to conversions inside Israel.”
Barkan sought to downplay concern both in the Bay Area and nationally among Conservative and Reform leaders that the proposed bill would reignite another battle over “Who Is A Jew?”
In response to phone calls from local Jewish leaders, and to an Israel Foreign Ministry directive, Barkan sent a letter to Jewish leaders “from Alaska to Fresno” saying lawyers at Israel’s Ministry of Justice are “only in the process of writing a draft for this bill, completion of which is a long ways off.”
At issue is a bill backed by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that would restate the Orthodox-run rabbinate’s authority over approving conversions performed in Israel.
The quasi-governmental Chief Rabbinate’s office, which is strictly Orthodox, does not recognize as valid any conversion performed by Conservative or Reform rabbis. The rabbinate controls all matters of Israeli personal status, such as marriage, divorce, conversion and burial.
A decade ago, non-Orthodox diaspora Jews embarked on a major battle to fight an ultra-religious Israeli bill limiting automatic citizenship under the Law of Return to Jews of matrilineal descent and those converted according to Orthodox law.
The proposed amendment to the law pitted Israeli authorities against diaspora Conservative and Reform groups, and came to be known as the debate over “Who Is A Jew?”
Religious parties in the governing right-wing coalition initiated the latest measure, after Israel’s High Court ruled during the previous Labor-led government that Conservative and Reform conversions in Israel should be legalized.
The bill, which has won the support of U.S. Orthodox Jews and Netanyahu himself, is seen by U.S. liberal Jewish groups as undermining the legal standing of non-Orthodox conversions performed outside of Israel as well.
At issue for many diaspora Jews is not the status of the relatively small number of people who convert to Judaism within the liberal movements and either live in or want to immigrate to Israel.
Instead, non-Orthodox leaders say, the real message from Israel to diaspora Jews is that the Jewish state, homeland for all Jews, is rejecting their Jewish identify as illegitimate .
“It’s an absolute affront to world Jewry that legislation would be introduced to deny the religious sensibilities of the vast majority of the world’s Jews,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, warned: “If American Jewish leadership does not articulate its dismay quickly, we could find ourselves with a law that will distance Israel from the diaspora.”
For its part, the Israeli government says it is in a quandary.
Israel’s Supreme Court “is putting pressure on us, saying that either we make a decision or they will,” an official in the Netanyahu administration said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
After the Israeli court decision paving the way for the recognition of non-Orthodox conversions in Israel, Orthodox parties vowed to introduce legislation to bar them, and made support for such legislation a condition for joining Netanyahu’s coalition.
“Within Likud, there is a great deal of concern that we don’t want to alienate diaspora leadership, but on the other hand we don’t want the government to fall,” the Israeli official said, noting the coalition’s dependence on the Orthodox parties.
Still, the government of Israel, through the Law of Return, guarantees automatic citizenship to anyone who is born Jewish or converts to Judaism by any means outside of Israel.
Nonetheless, Hirsch maintained, “the [looming] bill is a back-door way of modifying the Law of Return and changing the definition of `Who is a Jew.'”
But the proposed bill is winning support from heads of the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel of America, two major groups representing Orthodox Jews.
Dr. Mandell Ganchrow, president of the Orthodox Union, said he was happy with the Netanyahu government’s effort “to strengthen the Chief Rabbinate.”
“We have always rejected attempts to transplant the pluralism of the U.S. or of Christian countries to a Jewish society,” he said.
“The secular builders of Israel understood that Israel can only have one chief rabbi, one set of laws for kashrus and conversion and Jewish identity” when they endowed the rabbinate with control over all matters of personal status, Ganchrow said.
Ganchrow also lambasted the Reform and Conservative movements for “making this an issue.”
“Let us not super-saturate the air with this kind of controversy, and let us work together here on assimilation and intermarriage,” he said.
Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel of America, said, “This type of legislation is important in order to not further split the Jewish people into two groups, one which cannot intermarry with the other because they are merely pretending to be Jews.
“It is more important to keep the Jews intact as a nation,” he said, than to worry about creating problems between “a segment of American Jews and Israel.”
Leaders of the Reform and Conservative denominations, which represent more than 90 percent of American Jews who identify with a movement, are approaching the matter in several ways.
The goal of their strategy, they said, is to convince Netanyahu that the bill must be withdrawn to preserve the financial and emotional relationship between Jews in the diaspora and in Israel.
“To risk additional confrontation with the two religious movements which represent the majority of American Jews is the height of folly,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations.
“A prime minister who has a reputation for understanding American Jewish life should do better,” he said.
Yoffie and Schorsch jointly sent Netanyahu a terse letter Friday of last week, requesting a private meeting with him when he comes to the United States next week to address the Council of Jewish Federations’ General Assembly in Seattle.
“We are gravely concerned at the news” of the pending legislation, they wrote.
Yoffie also wrote to the president of CJF, asking him to put the matter on the agenda of the group’s G.A., which will bring together thousands of Jewish communal leaders.