Conversion reform should never have been born
Op-ed: Former Soviet immigrants realized that the conversion offered by the previous Netanyahu government is not an entrance ticket to the Jewish people, but an entrance ticket to Orthodoxy; the alternative, they discovered, is not that bad.
The story of the rise and fall of the conversion reform is a story of betrayal: Betrayal of Zionism, betrayal of the voters, betrayal of the Israeli society's strength. Out of more than one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, 200,000 to 300,000 are Jewish according to the Law of Return but not Jewish according to the Halacha. The difference isn't technical, it's fundamental.
The State's founding fathers saw anyone persecuted for his Jewish descent as a Jew. It isn't determined by the womb, at least not exclusively, but by a shared fate. If the Nuremberg Laws labeled a Jew according to his grandfather, the State of Israel will do the same. The Halacha, on the other hand, in its Orthodox interpretation, recognizes a person as a Jew only if his mother is Jewish. Whoever fails to fully meet this demand must undergo an exhausting conversion process.
Allegedly, there was a broad basis for agreement here. The secular political establishment sanctifies the nation state. It bases its demand that the entire world recognize Israel as the Jewish people's state on the Jewish majority here. The religious establishment sanctifies its monopoly over the definition of Jewish identity in the key crossroads of life – birth, marriage, divorce, death. The larger the number of converts, the stronger it will be. Theoretically, a swift conversion process for anyone who lives here as a Jew would benefit both establishments.
Theory is one thing and reality is another. The religious establishment in Israel is indrawn, obsolete and subject to rabbis whose profession is meticulousness. Such an establishment is incapable of opening gates – neither to seculars nor to other denominations in the Jewish people nor to the needs of the Israeli society and the State.
The immigrants from the Soviet Union realized that the conversion offered to them is not an entrance ticket to the Jewish people, but an entrance ticket to Orthodoxy. It's not kinship that they are being offered, but seclusion from their Jewish brothers, or worse, living in a lie.
The alternative, they discovered, is not that bad. In Israel, if you're neither an Arab nor a tourist, you're considered Jewish. It's being streetwise, regardless of what the rabbis say. As for marriage, you can fly to Cyprus. Quite a few veteran Israelis have chosen to get married there, despite being strictly kosher in the eyes of the Rabbinate.
The result is that in addition to all the separate tribes, which President Reuven Rivlin mentioned in his speech at the Hezliya Conference, another tribe is being created in Israel: Unrecognized Jews. In the next generations, when an Orthodox Israeli seeks to marry a woman, he will have to go back and investigate the marriage arrangements of her parents and her parents' parents, in case she is not a pure Jew. The haredi and Shas sector is already doing that today, and so are national-religious rabbis. Each sector has its own black lists.
The reform which the previous Netanyahu government decided on was a bad compromise between secular and Orthodox politicians. It contained no solution. There is no national-religious rabbi endowed with a rabbinical authority that is capable of dealing with such a sensitive problem – definitely not Rabbi Chaim Druckman. Everyone who was part of this decision – Elazar Stern, Tzipi Livni, Naftali Bennett – knew that there is no solution here, especially as the reality on the ground solved the problem in its own way.
Knesset Member Moshe Gafni of United Torah Judaism is a smart and experienced politician. I met him at the Knesset a week ago. He explained to me that his party had learnt an important lesson from its past mistakes: It no longer sets impossible demands, and it is careful not to evoke the majority's hatred unnecessarily. The unnecessary demand to cancel the nonexistent conversion report was made by Shas, not by UTJ. Shas has yet to learn the lesson.
