Civil marriage

Jeremy Sharon (Destined for disaster, June 4) claims, “The endless rabbinical squabbling and dallying over conversion will ultimately seal the fate of the Jewish population in the Jewish state” because “there are cur+rently some 400,000 Israeli citizens from the former Soviet Union and their descendants who are not Jewish according to Jewish law but who are fully integrated into Israeli society.”

While it may have been very generous to offer refuge to those non-Jews who risked persecution by racist regimes, this does not make them Jews and any state-sponsored attempt to do so will only aggravate the intermarriage crisis. The only effective solution would be to introduce civil marriage as an alternative, while still recognizing those conducted by authorized religious entities.

The Chief Rabbinate should simply not consider the former to be Jewish marriages, requiring a get [Jewish divorce], provided the state accepts that the latter can only be dissolved under the rules under which they were formalized.

Moshe Nissim’s recommendation “to transfer jurisdiction for conversions... to a new state-authorized Orthodox body” in order to make “conversion” easier cannot work, since the vast majority are simply not interested in accepting ol haTorah umitzvot (Jewish religious theory and practice), the sine qua non for conversion. After all, they “are not exactly inundating the rabbinical courts with requests to convert.”

MARTIN D. STERN

England