JERUSALEM — Israel’s minister of religious affairs recently attacked what he called the undue influence of the Reform movement in the Jewish state, considering its adherents can be counted only in the thousands.
“It’s not feasible that…they will influence the country as if there were 200,000 or 200 million Reform Jews here,” Eli Suissa of the ultrareligious Shas Party was quoted as saying.
It is true that the headlines grabbed by the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel in their fight for legal recognition belie the relatively small size of their formal membership.
It is also true that Israeli politicians of every stripe routinely censure non-Orthodox religious leaders in North America who complain of their groups’ second-class status in Israel.
The politicians tell those leaders that if they want their movements to have parity with Orthodoxy, which is Israel’s official state religion, their followers should immigrate to Israel and then add their numbers to those who vote for non-Orthodox representatives in Israeli elections.
But Reform and Conservative champions inside and outside Israel argue that numbers have nothing to do with rights. They say that if they had legal status affording them more visibility and access to the public, they could boast much higher numbers.
Rabbi Uri Regev, director of the Israel Religious Action Center of the Reform-affiliated Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, says that “given the opportunity to operate on an equal footing and reach out to the public without demonization,” non-Orthodox streams would flourish.
Until then, “to the extent we’re talking about Israel as a democracy,” he says, “it is inconceivable” the importance of religious freedoms would be measured by numbers of affiliates.
“Jews, of all people, should know better than to say liberties should be limited for small groups,” maintains Regev, the non-Orthodox movements’ most visible champion in the Israeli Supreme Court.
The Orthodox monopoly on religious affairs, which dates back to the founding of the state, is endorsed by most Orthodox Jews in Israel and abroad. Yet the number of adherents to Orthodoxy remains relatively small, representing an estimated 15 percent of Israel’s population.
The Orthodox influence, obviously, far outweighs those numbers — mainly because the secular majority goes along with traditional values.
It is a system that has hampered the growth in Israel of non-Orthodox streams.
The Conservative movement, called the Masorti movement in Israel, claims 20,000 members or affiliates, 50,000 program participants and 45 congregations and chavurot (informal prayer and study groups) nationwide. Twenty of the 45 congregations have rabbis.
The Reform movement claims 5,000 official members and tens of thousands who participate in Reform programs. Israel has 22 Reform congregations and 30 rabbis, about half of whom are sabras.
Reform and Conservative rabbis preside over certain religious life-cycle events, including circumcisions, bar mitzvahs and weddings. But their officiation at weddings, for instance, is not legally recognized in Israel. Israeli couples who choose that route must leave the country for their marriage ceremonies, which then are recognized under international treaties.
If non-Orthodox synagogues receive any public funding, it amounts to a minute fraction of the public funds that sustain the Orthodox establishment and have permitted it to flourish since the state’s founding. American-style formal dues-paying synagogue affiliation is not part of Israeli custom so Orthodox synagogues typically rely on public funding for their survival. Non-Orthodox synagogues are severely disadvantaged by the lack of such funds.
But the Reform and Conservative streams have secured some advances in recent years:
*The Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College has received for the past three years an annual grant of $100,000 from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, while the movement itself has received $60,000 a year for the past two years from the same source.
The ministry also awarded the Masorti movement $60,000 in 1994 and $100,000 last year.
And for several years, the Beit Midrash, Jerusalem’s quasi-independent affiliate of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, has received government funding.
*The Masorti movement last year received for the first time some funding from a national interministerial commission; the money was earmarked for the construction of a synagogue in Beersheva.
*A Supreme Court ruling secured Conservative and Reform representatives the right to sit on local religious councils, which have a large impact on local religious institutions. Among other functions, the councils pay neighborhood rabbis’ salaries and furnish maintenance and supplies for local (mostly Orthodox) synagogues and mikvehs, Jewish ritual baths. Only two local municipalities fund Reform synagogues.
That court ruling, however, has been resisted in many cities and is being challenged by members of the new coalition government. Several ministers and deputy ministers made news recently when they vowed that no Reform members would be seated on the councils. The Jerusalem municipality has been fined $10,000 for failing to seat Reform and Conservative members.
*The court also issued a ruling in November opening the way for the legal recognition of non-Orthodox conversions in Israel, but the governing coalition has pledged to bar that ruling through legislation.
*The two movements also won some recognition when the Shenhar Commission, appointed by the government to address the crisis in Jewish learning and identity, recommended that the curriculum in secular public schools include non-Orthodox Judaism. Funding for such programs has already been cut for budgetary reasons.
Although the number of Israelis who identify with non-Orthodox Judaism is small, the uneven legal status among religious groups appears to go against the public grain: Polls show that more than half the Israeli public favors equal status for non-Orthodox streams of Judaism and favors recognition of non-Orthodox marriages.
In fact, the legal monopoly on marriage enjoyed historically by the Orthodox is already showing signs of strain.
One survey by Hemdat, the Council for Freedom of Science, Religion and Culture, found that one in every five Israeli couples were married outside the Orthodox rabbinate in 1994. That figure includes those who rejected Orthodoxy, those who could not marry under Orthodox Jewish law, and immigrants whose Jewish status was uncertain. Ten percent of those were married by Reform or Conservative rabbis.
The number of Reform weddings has grown from 200 two years ago to more than 500 this year.
Until recently, Reform and Conservative leaders had reason to be confident of further gains. They were banking on the political capital of tens of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union whose religious status is questionable under Orthodox Jewish law. Those immigrants clearly need alternatives to Orthodoxy in matters ranging from marriage to burial.
But hopes were dashed this summer when Natan Sharansky, leader of the new Yisrael Ba’Aliyah Party, began to seek a special deal with the chief rabbinate for civil solutions for these immigrants — effectively cutting the non-Orthodox movements out of the equation.
At the same time, in an even more critical development, May’s elections saw a consolidation in the strength of the ultrareligious parties and a commitment by the new government to curb any erosion of power by the Orthodox.
The mood grew bitter and divided over religious differences. Campaign rhetoric from the Orthodox Shas Party included warnings that Reform Jews convert people by telephone.
Last month, the conflict intensified when Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi Doron gave a d’var Torah (commentary) that was interpreted by some as incitement to violence against Reform Jews. And more recently, there have been calls for the end of the Reform phenomenon in Israel, while government funding to the non-Orthodox streams appears to be in jeopardy.
Nonetheless, Regev sees light on the horizon. As evidence, he points to the recent outpouring of protest by non-Orthodox Israelis over efforts to close Jerusalem’s Bar-Ilan Street to traffic on Shabbat and holidays.
He says the new effort by politicians to crack down on Reform Judaism will awaken those “who didn’t give much thought before” to the need to fight to preserve religious liberties and support “an alternative Jewish voice.”