Tragedies for the nation-state
I agree wholeheartedly with your editorial “Stop the hurdles” (May 6). It is a tragedy that people like Jared Armstrong and Yosef Kibita have been denied Israeli citizenship despite doing everything asked of them by government officials. It is also tragic that hundreds of thousands of olim who entered Israel legally, under the Law of Return but are not considered Jewish according to Halacha, had barriers placed in their paths to conversion by the Israeli rabbinate.
Equally regrettable are the cases of Israeli children of converts who, while seeking to obtain permission to marry, have found that the conversions of their mothers have been retroactively canceled, meaning that the prospective brides or grooms are now considered ineligible to marry Jews in Israel.
All these personal tragedies are also tragedies for the nation-state of the Jews which needs to maintain its Jewish majority population. And these personal/national tragedies result from the fact that haredi rabbis and MKs who are setting the policies for conversion do not accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The problem will persist unless Israel institutes major reforms in electoral procedures and in governance.
Israel’s system of electing all members of the Knesset via proportional representation has resulted in every government being ruled by a coalition. This has given haredi parties power beyond their numbers in the population (the haredi parties will enter any coalition which will give them control over matters of religion). This has the unfortunate result of giving the appearance that Israel’s state religion is ultra-Orthodox Judaism.
If Israel is to maintain its Jewish majority and demonstrate its respect for all streams of the Jewish religion, the state should be defining “Who is a Jew?” and setting criteria for conversion practices. The job of the MK who registers people as Jews would then be simply to confirm that the prospective convert has met the state’s requirements for conversion to Judaism.
TOBY F. BLOCK
Atlanta