Israel’s jealous church
HAVIV RETTIG GUR
MAXIM Surdekov and Elina Roiz didn’t want to be a national cause celebre. They just wanted to get married.
Maxim is a young Russian-speaking Israeli who can prove his mother is Jewish. Elina was not Jewish, though many in her family were. So during her service in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in 2006, she converted to Judaism through Israel’s Orthodox Chief Rabbinate.
Maxim and Elina share much in life. They have been best friends since grade 2, have grown up in a multilingual setting, are patriotic Israelis and former IDF soldiers. And now, both Jewish, they decide to get married. Not so fast.
This is Israel, where the taxpayer-funded state rabbi is not your friend. When an Israeli encounters a state rabbi, more often than not this means that person is battling a low-level bureaucrat with power over their life but little understanding or concern for their situation.
A few weeks ago, Maxim and Elina attempted to register in the official rabbinate office in their home city of Ashkelon. It was there that they were met with the latest halachic invention that has swept some sections of the rabbinate. Conceived as a weapon in the turf war currently waging over the country’s rabbinic institutions between the modern, Zionist “national-religious” rabbis and the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox ones, it was deployed by ultra-Orthodox judges as a new means with which to torment their more lenient rabbinic opponents.
The weapon: the retroactive cancellation of conversions conducted by other Orthodox rabbis on the grounds that the converts, years later, are found to be “lax” in their observance of Jewish law.
Most famously, in 2008, the Charedi High Rabbinical Court judge Rabbi Avraham Sherman took a vicious stab at one of the revered leaders of the national-religious camp, Rabbi Hayim Druckman, when he announced the annulment of thousands of conversions done by Rabbi Druckman’s rabbinic courts over the years.
The annulment did not stand, with Israel’s chief rabbis coming out against it and a handful of national-religious rabbis threatening to establish a breakaway rabbinate more “in tune” with the needs of the people.
Even senior Charedi leaders were surprised by the extent of the annulment and the personal attacks included in Rabbi Sherman’s halachic opinion -— which accused Rabbi Druckman of conspiring to inject secret non-Jews into the Jewish community.
But back to our rabbi-crossed lovers Maxim and Elina, whose small story holds two vast tragedies: the erosion of conversion as a religious option and the undermining of a clear, crucial national interest.
As Elina discovered, it is not enough to have one’s fate inextricably tied to that of the Jewish people, or to study for years and pass the conversion process before a panel of Orthodox rabbis, or to be considered Jewish by one’s Jewish friends.
For Israel’s rabbinate, no convert may enter this circle if he is not willing to maintain -— permanently, without fail and while accepting the risk that another rabbi will still be unsatisfied years later -— a Charedi standard of observance.
“There is no conversion without a total acceptance of an Orthodox lifestyle,” explained Ashkelon Chief Rabbi Yosef Haim Bloi, the man who refused to approve the couple’s marriage.
In a country where there is no legal instrument for marriage outside the rabbinate (except recognition of marriages done abroad), Elina and Maxim are stuck with a February wedding date and an Israeli rabbinate that views them as a weapon in a turf war, not as community members in need of rabbinic leadership and solutions.
As for the national interest, the rabbis seem blissfully unaware that 300,000 non-Jewish immigrants have come to Israel since the 1990s through the Law of Return. They are not random labour migrants who could be turned away, but rather the family members of Jews -— their parents, half-siblings, children.
They are part of this people, even if they are not Jews, and in brazenly ignoring them and their needs, the rabbinate denies the needs of multitudes of Jewish families.
Moreover, they are by now utterly integrated into Israeli society. They are high-tech pioneers, musicians, soldiers. Their names are on the lists of the war dead and the terror victims. If you ask them, they often say, “I’m Jewish, but not officially.”
They are indistinguishable in their values and cultural commitments to their officially Jewish friends and neighbours. Their children, native Hebrew-speakers, are impossible to tell apart from those born Jewish.
So inventing obstacles to their conversion is not just cruel, it is stupid. It is time for Israel’s rabbis to make a choice: give us leadership, give us real answers to the issues affecting our society, or get out of our lives and our taxpaying ¬≠pockets.
Haviv Rettig Gur is the Jewish world reporter for The Jerusalem Post.
comments