Last week, an Israeli
parliamentary committee gave preliminary approval to a draft legislation
that would give Orthodox rabbis in Israel more control over
conversions.The more religiously liberal Reform and Conservative
movements that represent the vast majority of Jews outside Israel
contend the new legislation would be a dangerous blow to religious
pluralism.Netanyahu told his Cabinet on Sunday that he feared the
bill would create a rift in the Jewish world and that if he couldn't
find a compromise solution, he would ask his coalition partners to vote
against it.Under the current practice, Israel recognizes only
conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis inside Israel, but people
converted by non-Orthodox rabbis outside the country are automatically
eligible for Israeli citizenship like other Jews. The proposed
legislation would give Israel's chief rabbinate the legal power to
decide whether any conversion is legitimate.The group most likely to suffer would be immigrants who converted to Judaism abroad and could now be denied Israeli citizenship.The
bill touches a raw nerve in the Reform and Conservative movements,
whose presence is marginal in Israel, where Orthodox rabbis have a near
monopoly over religious practices such as marriage and burial.While
staunch backers of Israel, these groups look worriedly at the prospect
of the country's Orthodox religious establishment further entrenching
its control, and in effect being the arbiter of Jewish identity. Passage
of the bill would also be a blow to the legitimacy of non-Orthodox
rabbis the world over.Rabbi David Saperstein, head of the
Washington-based Religious Action Center of the Union of Reform Judaism,
said the bill, if passed, would mark a "crisis of the first order." "It
would be an enormous blow to the unity of the Jewish people and the
principle of religious freedom in Israel," said Saperstein, who is
visiting the country to lobby lawmakers to drop the bill."The
American Jewish community will remain strongly engaged in Israel, but
the message will be sent that the government of Israel does not accept
our rabbis and our movement as legitimate, and it would make all our
work much more difficult." Of the world's roughly 13 million Jews, half
live in Israel and most of the rest are concentrated in North America.Israeli
religious authorities' skepticism about the legitimacy of overseas
conversions has been cited as one of the main causes of a growing rift
between Israel and world Jewry.Rotem's bill has even provoked a group of Jewish USsenators to draft a rare letter of complaint to Israel's ambassador to Washington, the Jerusalem Post newspaper reported.Caley Gray, communications director for signatory Sen.Frank
Lautenberg (D-New Jersey), told the Jerusalem Post that "Senator
Lautenberg hopes the Knesset does not pass this legislation, which he
views as divisive." The bill's sponsor, David Rotem, an Orthodox
lawmaker from the largely secular Yisrael Beitenu party, has rejected
the criticism, saying his goal was to make conversion easier for
immigrants from the former Soviet Union who make up the majority of his
party's voters. The bill empowers selected municipal chief rabbis to
conduct conversions. Currently, all such power is vested in the chief
rabbinate in Jerusalem.Roughly 1 million people immigrated to Israel
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many with questionable ties to
Judaism. Rotem has said his bill would allow would-be converts the
freedom to shop around and look for an amenable local rabbi.
