Israeli leader yielding to Orthodox Jews prompts global uproar

JERUSALEM — The president of the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbying group flew to Israel for an emergency meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while other Jewish leaders canceled a dinner with him. One prominent Jewish donor demanded a refund for the $1 million in Israel bonds he had just purchased.

Jews around the world have been in an uproar in the week since Netanyahu yielded to pressure from his ultraOrthodox coalition partners and suspended a plan to provide a better space for non-Orthodox men and women to worship together at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

That new prayer space had long been a goal of the Reform and Conservative movements, popular in the West. And in another blow to those more liberal wings of Judaism, the government also approved a contentious bill enshrining the strictly Orthodox Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel.

Together, those moves have reawakened a decades-old dispute over who is a Jew. And they have prompted an emotional debate over the nature of the relationship between the world’s Jews and the Jewish homeland — at a time when a right-wing Israeli government, under increased international criticism, has relied on support among the generally more liberal Jewish diaspora in the West.

The furor over the Western Wall agreement boils down to a refusal by Israel’s Orthodox religious authorities to grant any recognition to Reform and Conservative Judaism. The main prayer space at the Western Wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, has separate men’s and women’s sections, in the Orthodox tradition, and is run like an Orthodox synagogue.

The response to the government’s moves has been disappointment and rage, particularly among Jews in North America.

Charles Bronfman, the CanadianAmerican billionaire and a major Jewish philanthropist, sent a letter to the Israeli prime minister taking him to task and noting that “to my knowledge, no other country in the world denies any Jew based on denomination.”

And the board of governors of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental body that works to connect Israel with Jews around the world and that is led by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, flatly canceled a gala dinner with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has tried to mitigate the backlash, freezing the conversion bill for six months in return for a withdrawal of a recent court petition from the Reform and Conservative movements to have their conversions performed in Israel recognized. But the anger has not abated.

“Prime Minister, you must know that the wholeness of the people is more important than the wholeness of the coalition,” said Sallai Meridor, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and a former chairman of the Jewish Agency, referring to Netanyahu’s efforts to preserve his political alliance with the ultra-Orthodox parties.

Addressing about a thousand demonstrators from the Reform and Conservative movements and the feminist Women of the Wall group outside Netanyahu’s residence Saturday night, Meridor said the increasing power of the ultra-Orthodox, known in Hebrew as Haredim, or those fearing God, was making him “a fearful Jew.”

Noam Tibon, a retired Israeli general, told the crowd that Netanyahu had “caused strategic damage to the state of Israel.”

The president of the United Statesbased Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, was grim. “This horse trading is going to affect the well-being, unity and diversity of the Jewish people,” he said in an interview.

A poll commissioned by Hiddush, an advocacy group for religious freedom and equality, indicated that two-thirds of Jews in Israel opposed the suspension of the Western Wall plan and the conversion bill.