Ex-Mossad chief Halevy knocks conversion rules
Stringencies turn our backs on immigrants, former security head tells World Jewish Congress
Israel has betrayed a large segment of the Jewish people, Ephraim Halevy a former Mossad chief and a past head of the National Security Council said on Monday at a session of the World Jewish Congress at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Halevy, who was closely involved in bringing Soviet and Ethiopian Jews to Israel, spoke at a breakfast session titled “Israel-Diaspora relations 70 years-on,” hosted by the WJC and its subsidiary, the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR).
“Israel betrayed them by taking strict rules of conversion, which had not been used when Ezra and Nehemiah came back from Babylon with children whose mothers were not Jewish,” he said.
No one asked the people who came from Auschwitz and Majdanek for documents that proved their Jewishness, Halevy said. “Hitler was sufficient proof that they were Jews.”
Referring to Russian immigrants and others – many of whom have served in the army, some losing their lives in the process – he said the government and the Knesset cannot turn their backs on such people on the basis of Jewish identity.
Jerusalem-born ICFR president Dan Meridor, a former cabinet secretary and government minister, declared that the issue was not a discussion between Jewish communities. Although there are Jews in Israel he said, “Israel is not a Jewish community, it is a state.”
He then asked the question that begged itself: “So what is the role of Jews in the Diaspora?”
Supplying his own answer, Meridor, a former finance minister, compared the situation to a company in which the executive board makes all the decisions and Jews in the Diaspora have the option to buy shares.
He recalled that when the first trickle of Jews came out of Soviet Russia, America offered to grant them citizenship as stateless people. This greatly annoyed Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Along with Meridor, Shamir traveled to the United States to speak to then-secretary of state George Schultz about abrogating such legislation. Ever since the establishment of the State of Israel, Shamir insisted, there was no such thing as a stateless Jew. If Jews later wanted to go to other countries, that was their prerogative, but they had to so via Israel first, Shamir told Schultz, who understood and agreed. One result of that meeting was that many Soviet Jews who might have otherwise chosen to go elsewhere, came to Israel and stayed. MERIDOR ALSO made the point that for two or three centuries Jews had been champions of human rights all over the world. “When you are a minority, you fight for human rights, you fight for yourself,” he said. “But in 1948, there was a dramatic change and Jews suddenly became a majority. The moral test was do we keep the same values regarding minority communities in Israel.”
Up until recently, he observed, there was no left-right debate on human rights, which were a matter of consensus. Today, said Meridor, anyone advocating human rights and the rule of law “is depicted as a leftist.”
During the first 20 years of the state, Halevy said, the international force in the Diaspora was the Jewish People not the United States. “Jews in the United States were apprehended and jailed for trying to smuggle arms into Israel. For the first 20 years, America was absent. Russia supported Israel with de jure recognition and supplied arms, vehicles and even a few aircraft.”
Russia regarded Israel as an important investment in their national interests. But Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was more intent on making the new state a part of the Western world.
As a result, the Russian national interest changed, “and it became an implacable enemy of Israel” said Halevy.
Halevy acknowledged, in terms of what Israel has achieved, that it could not have been done without donors in the Jewish Diaspora who are still supporting Israel’s academic and other projects.
One of the great things that Israel has done, he underscored, was to take responsibility for the defense of Jews anywhere in the world, which is what brought Jews to Israel from places such as Baghdad, Europe, Morocco and Syria. The last major mission of this kind, he said, was to bring in Jews from Ethiopia and to take responsibility for the five million Jews who were living behind the Iron Curtain.
It was Israel that initiated the “Let my people go” campaign, he said, though contacts between Israel and Russian Jews had been established long before.
As secretary general of the students union, Halevy had led a youth delegation to Moscow as far back as 1956. While he was there, he met a former Russian youth leader named Alexander Shelepin, who was then first secretary of the Komsomol. Neither of them knew at the time that Shelepin would become head of the KGB and Halevy, head of the Mossad. Nor did they know they would open a back channel of communication with each other after the Soviet Union officially severed relations with Israel on June 9, 1967, and did not resume them till December, 1991.
When Russia finally allowed one million immigrants to come Israel, the Knesset had to decide who was eligible. “They gave eligibility the widest possible leeway so that an immigrant did not have to have a Jewish mother,” said Halevy. “It was enough to have one Jewish grandfather.”
Those people came to Israel, had children and grandchildren, but Israel betrayed them by its strict conversion laws, Halevy said. JONATHAN ARKUSH, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews said Jews in the Diaspora face constant challenges and questions, such as: Who should have the prime say on conversions, Israel or Diaspora Jewry; How can Israel make peace with her neighbors; or Who is a Jew?
If there are more Jews in the Diaspora than in Israel, “Shouldn’t the Diaspora have a casting vote?” he asked.
But when it came to security, “Israel should be the guardian of its security,” Arkush said, and stated his opposition to Diaspora Jews lecturing Israel on any aspect of security.
The key role of Diaspora Jews he said, was to speak out on behalf of Israel and to nurture Jewish communities wherever they are, so that they have a vision of Jewish peoplehood. “The destiny of the Jewish people has to be the destiny of the Jew in Jerusalem, Manchester and Moldova. And there is a need to create newly infused Jews who will make aliya for the best reasons and not because they are forced to.”
Arkush was opposed to Diaspora communities engaging in criticism of Israeli policies. He pointed out how tough it is to deal on a daily basis with people from the man in the street to a government minister, who make disparaging comments about Israel. Nonetheless, he said Diaspora Jews can debate points of disagreement with Israeli colleagues and perhaps help in the process.
Former Labor MK Einat Wilf, a declared atheist with a respect for religious observance but not for rabbinic coercion, focused on sovereignty. “Zionism was a rebellion in which we took control of our own destiny,” she said. “The core of Zionism is the Jews’ mastering of their own fate.” This applies not only to Israel, she said, but to Jews around the world who can walk with heads held high, whereas for centuries entire theological structures advocated that neither Jews nor women were entitled to equality and that each must know their place.
“Whenever anyone challenges a power structure there is an ongoing effort to put them back in their place. Zionism is first and foremost a redistribution of power.”
Wilf, who shares Halevy’s view of the rabbinate, said the role of a rabbi is that of a teacher not a decision-maker. “The rabbinate was given power by the state and the state can take it away from them.” In her closing sentence, Wilf said: “Mi rabbanut le ribbonut – from rabbis to sovereignty.”