NATALIE WEINSTEIN
Bulletin Staff
The Israeli government's recent reassurances that converts from the diaspora won't face legal-status problems in the Jewish state are absurd, a longtime religious-pluralism advocate warns.
Besides the proposed legislation designed to reaffirm Orthodox control over Israeli conversions, Rabbi Uri Regev said, major predicaments already exist for non-Israeli Jews who convert outside the Jewish state, immigrate to Israel and then try to marry.
Orthodox rabbinic courts in Israel, which govern marriage, have been disregarding these conversions and turning these Jews away.
"There is a major issue of `Who is a Jew?' hovering," said Regev, director of the Reform movement's Jerusalem-based Israel Religious Action Center.
Regev, who is on a sabbatical that consists of nonstop speaking engagements across the United States, visited the Bay Area last month to spur action on religious pluralism and on the pending Knesset legislation. His trip was sponsored by the Association of Reform Zionists of America and the New Israel Fund.
"The `Who is a Jew?' issue shouldn't be reduced to `One side of the ocean is all right and the other side of the ocean isn't all right,'" Regev said.
The pending legislation would reinforce Orthodox authority over conversions performed in Israel. It would bypass a 1995 Israeli Supreme Court ruling that opened a door to the recognition of Reform and Conservative conversions performed there.
Regev is the attorney who argued this case before the court and won. But he is intimately tied to the issue in another way. In 1986, he became one of the first Israelis ordained through the Reform movement. Like other non-Orthodox rabbis in Israel, he can't perform rites such as marriage or conversion.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and chief spokesman David Bar-Illan recently reassured American Jews that the pending legislation ultimately will not affect their converts, but Regev asserts their statements are either "deceptive or ignorant."
"Either one is disturbing," he said.
Though two previously submitted bills would require the Israeli chief rabbinate to approve all conversions, Netanyahu has created a committee to write a bill specific only to conversions performed in Israel.
The new bill was not yet public at the time of his interview with the Jewish Bulletin. But Regev said inside sources have told him the legislation would likely state that conversions in Israel will require approval by the rabbinic courts.
"If my sources are correct, it's a disturbing twist," Regev said.
Rabbinic courts, which oversee life-cycle events such as marriage, have become increasingly strict and exclusionary in recent years, Regev said.
"Unfortunately, what we see is a growing trend of fundamentalism and rigidity."
Regev already knows of several recent incidents in which converts have faced problems in these same rabbinic courts:
*A Safed woman who had made aliyah found out that she couldn't marry in Israel.
Her mother had converted through Reform Judaism before marrying decades ago. This convert's daughter, the Safed woman, was registered as a Jew by the Israeli government; but her mother's conversion was deemed improper by a rabbinic court, thus negating the woman's Jewish status and her ability to marry in Israel.
*A man who had been converted through Orthodoxy in the United States made aliyah but learned that he couldn't wed in Israel.
When this man wanted to get married, he was referred to the rabbinic court in Netanya. Though his conversion certificate was valid, the man was asked whether he ever used the telephone on Shabbat or ever ate at his nonkosher kibbutz.
He answered that he sometimes answered the phone on Shabbat and that he ate at the kibbutz, but that he was a vegetarian. The rabbinic court chose not to recognize his conversion, and the man had to travel to England to marry.
The pending legislation, in some form, may pass in the Knesset, Regev said.
"The numbers game unfortunately works against us," he said.
But it's not a done deal. The legislation may unravel if the Likud and Labor parties decide to form a national unity government as has been rumored, he said. The power of the Orthodox parties would dramatically decrease because they would no longer hold the Likud's current coalition together.
"The religious parties would lose their bargaining chip," he said.
Pressure from outside of Israel could also make a difference, he said.
"The criticism mounting here has had a positive effect," he said. "We have to keep on hammering."
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