Attacks on conversion bill are misleading

Fresnozionism.org
18 July '10

The Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) — the largest Jewish denomination the US — sprung into action recently to protect us from a “dangerous threat”:

Sunday, July 12th, abruptly and with no warning, a committee vote was held on the bill sponsored by Member of the Knesset David Rotem that poses a dangerous threat to the rights of Conservative, Reform, and all non-Orthodox Jews, who comprise the overwhelming majority of world Jewry…

For 2,000 years, Judaism has treated Jews-by-choice (converts) the same as Jews-by-birth. This treatment is rooted in the Talmudic teaching that “as soon as a convert emerges from the mikvah (ritual bath) she or he is Jewish for all purposes.” (Yevamot 47b).

Since its founding 62 years ago, the State of Israel, through the Law of Return, has welcomed Jews from around the world as citizens in the world’s only Jewish state.

This legislation would delegitimize all non-Orthodox conversions. It would also preclude conferring citizenship under the Law of Return to Jews who did not qualify for such status on a prior visit (ie. converts).
[my italics]

The URJ is calling for its members to write to the Prime Minister and to apply every kind of pressure available to US Jews to prevent the passage of this bill. Rabbis will be speaking to their congregations from the pulpit, mass emails have been sent to Reform Jews, etc. Recently, the president of the largest congregation in our city said to me that “I’ve always supported Israel [he has], but I’m going to fight on this.”

A change to the criteria used by the State of Israel to determine ‘who is a Jew’ for the purposes of the Law of Return would indeed be big news. The Orthodox parties have tried in the past to change the law to disallow non-Orthodox converts from receiving citizenship, but have always been beaten back.

But in fact the bill doesn’t do anything like that.

Its main purpose is to decentralize the conversion process in Israel, in order to solve the problem of 320,000 Russian immigrants who would like to convert to Judaism but have been unable to, because of bureaucratic problems and ultra-Orthodox obstructionism. It makes it possible for local rabbis to perform conversions, and makes it harder for ultra-Orthodox ones to annul them.

This is a huge issue, and the bill tries to fix it without changing the traditional religious-secular status quo.

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