Israel Avoids Conversion Law Showdown

The New York Times reports that Israel has avoided an immediate conflict over a newly proposed conversion law by setting aside more months for negotiation. However, the law still remains controversial:

JERUSALEM — A growing crisis between American Jews and the Israeli government over a proposed law on religious conversion was averted — or at least delayed — this week, with both sides agreeing to a six-month period of negotiation. But the depth of American anger and the byzantine complexity of Israeli politics suggest that a solution is a long way off.

Late Thursday night, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement that Natan Sharansky, the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, would lead a committee of the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements and that no conversion law would be submitted before January. Litigation in the Israeli Supreme Court on the same topic brought by the Reform and Conservative movements would be suspended for the same period.

The idea of delay came from Mr. Netanyahu, who said this week that the proposed law, which had passed a committee of Parliament, “could tear apart the Jewish people.” He had received tens of thousands of enraged e-mail messages from American Jews who had been urged to contact him by their rabbis.

“Please join me in writing an e-mail to Prime Minister Netanyahu to call a halt to this historic mistake,” wrote Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side of New York last week, in a typical appeal. “Judaism and the Jewish people do not belong exclusively to the most reactionary among us!”

The bill that so angered American Jewish leaders was actually aimed at making conversion easier for the 300,000 Israelis who moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Those Israelis are not, by Orthodox rabbinic law, considered Jewish because they come from mixed parentage. The law would have tried to make conversion easier by granting conversion powers to local rabbis across the country, a group considered closer to their communities.

But after objections from the ultra-Orthodox, the bill formally placed authority for conversion in the hands of the chief rabbinate and declared Orthodox Jewish law to be the basis of conversion, making Americans fear that their more lenient conversion processes would be invalidated.

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