July 9, 2015 — New York, New York
The Jewish Religious Equality Coalition (J-REC) is dismayed by the Israeli government’s decision to repeal the conversion reform legislation approved in November 2014. The Israeli government initially approved the passage of the conversion reform that permitted local rabbis to set up conversion courts, which would have eased the process significantly for thousands of Israelis seeking state-recognized conversion.
Additionally, the Israeli government transferred authority of the rabbinical courts from the Justice Ministry to the Ministry of Religious Services, which is overseen by the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.
“The Israeli government’s decision to roll back conversion reform, and transfer authority of the rabbinical courts to Shas, is a blow to previous efforts aimed at breaking the monopoly of the Chief Rabbinate,” said Dov Zakheim, chair of J-REC. “These decisions are deeply damaging and delegitimize a large segment of Jews, both in Israel and the Diaspora.”
J-REC has warned repeatedly that the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over personal status issues, such as conversion, poses a threat to the democratic nature of Israel and ultimately to its national security. Although the conversion bill fell farshort of mandating full religious equality, it was a positive step in broadening accessibility to conversion.
Moving control over marriage courts to the Ministry of Religious Services means that these courts, whose jurisdiction extends to all Jewish citizens of Israel, have been moved farther away from broad government oversight and closer to a Ministry whose leader, Shas MK David Azoulay, recently asserted that he cannot bring himself to recognize Reform Jews as members of the Jewish people, and then clarified by invoking “The damage caused by Reform Judaism, which has brought the greatest danger to the Jewish people, the danger of assimilation.”
The American Rabbinate is charged with mustering pro-Israel support among constituents. Repeated humiliation of so many within the Rabbinate, and failure to revise the laws governing personal-status issues, risks alienating the bulk of American Jewry and will make it more difficult to secure that support.
J-REC is a broad-based coalition of American Jews and Israelis dedicated to the realization of full religious equality in the Jewish state, and is mobilizing support for the creation of alternatives to the Chief Rabbinate.
