Let My People Convert!

Russian Jewish immigrants to Israel face an absurd situation. In Russia, their identity cards marked them as Jewish, and they experienced anti-Semitism in their professional and personal lives. They were reminded of their Jewishness on a regular basis, whether they liked it or not.

But once they get to Israel, if they can't confirm that their mother was Jewish, they are viewed as non-Jews--and must face a laborious conversion process to be considered as Jews. The conversion process is controlled by the Orthodox religious monopoly, which demands these "non-Jews" adopt a traditional Orthodox lifestyle. Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist conversions are not officially recognized. The rationale for such a restrictive, demanding system is that "Non-religious converts, even if their conversions were performed by Jewish organizations, will not adapt, will not become acclimatized, and will lead to a future trail of separations and tragedies," says Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, a rabbi for the conversion courts. But Rosen, like most arbiters of Jewishness in Israel, ignores the fact that half of Israelis consider themselves secular, and even the majority of those who consider themselves "traditional" are flexible about the rules of Shabbat.

Rabbi Gregory Ketler, coordinator of the (Reform) Progressive Rabbis' Council in Israel, and Rabbi Jerome Epstein, head of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, each recently wrote about urging Israel to open up the conversion process. And Avirama Golden makes the point in Ha'aretz that if Ruth, the best-known convert in the Bible, wanted to join the Jews today, she would probably be denied:

But if Ruth were to decide today to link her life with Israel and the Jewish people, her chances would be negligible. The Orthodox establishment - which is cut off from the majority of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, with its various denominations, as well as from many Israelis - has over the last few years fortified the walls that prevent hundreds of thousands of people from joining the State of Israel and its society as citizens with equal rights. Full citizenship in Israel is possible only for those who convert.

Israeli Conversion Impasse Broken--Sort of

The (New York) Jewish Week broke the news last week that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has agreed to recognize all conversions by the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest Orthodox rabbinical association in North America. In exchange, the RCA will set up regional conversion courts that will follow the strict standards requested by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate.

I've written about the sorry state of affairs for would-be converts in Israel before, and this is welcome news. Would-be converts from the U.S. who are looking to undergo an Orthodox conversion can now be confident that their conversion will be recognized in Israel. At the same time, there are numerous groups that this decision doesn't help, including: those who converted before the official network of regional courts were established; those who went through the state-funded conversion academy in Israel; those who converted under Conservative or Reform auspices; and those who converted under Orthodox auspices outside of North America.

While potential converts still face numerous obstacles in Israel, the Orthodox in America, to their credit, are beginning to open up toward non-Jewish spouses looking to convert. Traditionally, Orthodox rabbis did not accept intermarriage as a legitimate reason to convert, but Eternal Jewish Family, a non-profit based out of New York, is looking to change that.

The group is holding a seminar in Phoenix May 13-15 on "Universally Accepted Conversion in Interfaith Marriage."

The Link Sink

I know you're supposed to clean house before Passover, but here are some interesting links that have piled up in the last week or two:

• Tamara Podemski is an unknown in the U.S. but she's starred on a handful of Canadian TV shows and recorded three albums. Her father is Israeli and her mother is Ojibwa (a native Canadian tribe). She proudly refers to herself as a "fully functional half-breed," and appears to take great pride in her mixed heritage--which, incidentally, produced a gorgeous woman. For more on here, read this profile in the Canadian Jewish News.
• An educational publisher agreed to withdraw and destroy the remaining copies of a reference book on Israel after a major Orthodox organization objected to the book's characterization of Orthodox Jews, according to The (New York) Jewish Week. Agudath Israel of America was upset over a passage in the book that said that "some ultra-Orthodox Jews" want to limit Israel's Law of Return to exclude Reform and Conservative Jews because "they are not really at all because they are not strict in their observance of all the religious laws." There's no question the passage is wrong, but it contains a kernel of truth. It is not uncommon for ultra-Orthodox Jews to ridicule and denigrate more progressive streams of Judaism, especially Reform, because they doesn't fit their strict definitions of what Judaism is. It also taps into the larger issue over conversions and the fact that Israel's acceptance of converted Jews is hamstrung by bureaucracy, corruption and political subservience to the Orthodox.
• Building Jewish Bridges, one of the country's best outreach programs, located in San Francisco's East Bay, recently started a blog. Keep up the good work.


• After they vigorously clean their house of all chametz--non-kosher-for-Passover food, meaning bread, pasta and the like--traditional households "sell" their chametz to a non-Jew and then buy it back after Passover is over. The tradition requires that the buyer be a non-Jew. The Jerusalem Post has an interesting article about the issue, and what happens if you sell your hametz to a non-Jew who is actually Jewish by traditional definitions? The article notes that it is preferable to sell hametz to Arabs in Israel because there has been so little Arab-Jewish intermarriage that one can feel quite secure that the buyer is not "actually" Jewish. It's not remotely the writer's intent, but I found that the piece highlights the silliness of basing Jewish definition on descent rather than practice or self-identification. Under traditional rules, it would be OK to sell hametz to a committed Reform Jew whose mother wasn't Jewish but not OK to sell it to an evangelical Christian whose mother's maternal grandmother was Jewish! Oy.

Remaking the Reform Movement

Rabbi David Forman, the founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, wrote a provocative op-ed in the Jerusalem Post arguing that the Reform movement needs to change if it hopes to engage Jews in Israel, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Germany. While Chabad has emerged as a dominant Jewish force in many of these places, and other more far-flung communities, the Reform movement "has barely made a dent in the consciousness of Jews in these places."

He doesn't blame the the leadership of the international Reform movement (the World Union for Progressive Judaism) or the leadership of the North American Reform movement (the Union for Reform Judaism), but rather the constitutents of the North American Reform movement.

...while ... the Union of Reform Judaism ... has adopted WUPJ's religious ideology, whereby both Jewish peoplehood and the centrality of Israel to Jewish theology should be primary forces in the life of a Jew, the URJ's constituents have not. Preaching by North American Reform leaders about commitment to the Jewish people does not resonate with most US Jews.

He blames the lack of focus on international Jewish peoplehood on three causes:

1. intermarriage


2. a focus on spirituality over intellectualism


3. a negative attitude towards Israel because it has not recognized Reform as a legitimate religious movement

Intermarriage and the focus on spirituality are intertwined in his mind. Because claims of peoplehood may ring hollow, or even offensive, to people in interfaith relationships, he says that the Reform movement in North America has become primarily a "faith-based religion." Further, in an apparent attempt to duplicate the success of American evangelical Christianity, Reform synagogues have focused on personal spirituality over intellectualism and communal prayer.

If Reform members in the U.S. change their priorities to show greater attachment to international Jewish peoplehood, he says, more money will be spent on sending Reform emissaries to all those communities that Chabad now dominates.

His conclusion is not wrong, but it seems to me he's willing to gamble with the Reform movement's greatest strength--its growing membership and presence in the U.S.--for an uncertain outcome. If the members of Reform synagogues don't quite see eye-to-eye with their leaders or the leaders of the international Reform movement, it's for a good reason. Jews in the U.S. are attracted to Reform synagogues because of the movement's open attitude towards intermarried couples and because of synagogues' attention to spiritual needs. In an assimilated, atomized society, these are more pressing needs for most Jews than a notion of attachment to international Jewish peoplehood.

I also think he casts the Reform movement in the U.S. in an overly uncharitable light. Yes, Reform synagogues may de-emphasize peoplehood somewhat and may focus on spiritualism over intellectualism, but their focus on social action is at least as strong as their focus on spirituality. And the focus on spirituality can be considered a form of marketing, much the same way it is in evangelical Christian movements and even in Chabad. You grab people with a promise to fulfill their spiritual needs and as they get further engaged, they will want to do more sophisticated study--and probably feel a greater attachment to the Jewish people. And it's not like Reform synagogues don't push trips to Israel as much as the other progressive movements. I would guess that most Reform Jews in the U.S. are totally ignorant Israel's position on Reform Jewry.

I wonder if Reform's lack of success in the rest of the world is more due to a lack of international understanding than due to a lack of American support. In Israel, for example, there are only three stops on the religious spectrum: secular, religious or haredi. Either you're secular or you're religious. If you're secular, you attend synagogue for holidays and life cycle events and keep up the illusion that you're as observant as religious Jews--and on the following day you return to your regular life.

In post-communist Russia, too, I'm not sure if people's notions of religion are sophisticated enough yet to understand the idea of a progressive Judaism. In communist Russia, you were persecuted for religious practice so only the most devout people ended up practicing their religion. I imagine that has created a gap between secular life and religion in many people's minds that can't be reconciled. Chabad, on the other hand, offers a wholly transformative brand of traditional Judaism, that probably fits in with people's faint memories of what shtetl Jews looked and acted like. And it's hardly fair to compare the success of any movement with Chabad--Chabad was an outreach organization before it was a religious movement, whereas the other movements were around for decades, if not centuries, before outreach became a central concern.

Israel's Chief Rabbinate Curtails Conversions

Official recognition continues to get more difficult for patrilineal Jews in Israel, as a state-funded religious academy has decided to halt sending conversion candidates to rabbinical courts until the chief rabbinate loosens its conversion requirements, says The Forward.

Recently, the chief rabbinate has been tightening its requirements for conversion. Within the last few months, the chief rabbinate moved to freeze all conversions from abroad until it could determine whether the converting rabbis met its strict standards. The Forward story relates tales of people who were told by rabbinical courts that they needed to move to Orthodox neighborhoods, send their children to Orthodox schools and have their whole family adopt an Orthodox lifestyle before the court would recognize their conversion.

Despite the increasing restrictions on conversion, demand remains high among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who do not have Jewish mothers. Many of them come from non-religious backgrounds and want to be recognized as Jews for purposes of marriage; their desire is to enter the secular mainstream, not the haredi ghettoes. But things look only to get worse, not better, when the Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, says that the only acceptable standards for conversion are Orthodox standards.

"Either you are a Jew or you aren't a Jew," he told The Forward. "And if you don't belief in Torah, then you are not a Jew."

Intermarriage in Israel

A new study claims that 10 percent of marriages in Israel are intermarriages, and that only 58 percent of all families in Israel have a Jewish father and Jewish mother, says Ynet.

New Family, an Israeli organization dedicated to advancing the rights of non-traditional families, conducted the study. It was based on an analysis of divorce filings because the only source for official marriage registration in Israel, the Chief Rabbinate, does not keep track of intermarriages. Among those mixed couples, the majority (65 percent) are between immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The study also showed that 57 percent of interfaith couples in Israel are raising their children Jewish--as compared to 33 to 39 percent in the U.S.

The survey also looked at Israelis' opinions on intermarriage. Sixty percent of Israelis said they oppose intermarriages, while 17 percent said they are not opposed to intermarriage but would object if one of their children wanted to marry a non-Jew. Opposition was strongest among the religious, of course, but was also higher among the old as compared to the young and among the married than the unmarried.

A report on the survey is available on New Family's website.

Solving the Mixed Marriage Riddle in Israel: From Ben-Gurion to the Present

The difficulties faced by modern interfaith couples and other non-traditional families in Israel is the focus of a great Jerusalem Post piece by Ruth Eglash, "Challenging the consensus of the Israeli family."

The article uses the story of a Russian-born Jew and her Moroccan Muslim husband as the jumping off point for a discussion about the obstacles faced by Israel's 800,000 non-traditional families. The couple had to go to Paraguay to get married, jump through bureaucratic hoops to have the marriage recognized in Israel and undergo a DNA test to "prove" that the man was father to their child.

"The consensus says that a family in Israel can only be a man and woman united in an Orthodox Jewish marriage," states [Irit] Rosenblum [director of the New Family Organization, which advocates on behalf of non-traditional families in Israel]. "That means single-parent families are not allowed, gay parents are not allowed, common law unions are not allowed, civil marriages are not allowed and interfaith marriages are not allowed."

Moreover, she says, while unconventional unions are largely accepted - even if not practiced - by most of mainstream society, the establishment and the legal system do not provide for them or recognize them in the same way they do the traditional nuclear family.

The problem, which even a rabbi interviewed for the article recognizes, is that Israel does not allow for civil marriage. In 1953, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate was given sole control over all matters relating to marriage and divorce--and the Orthodox have held onto their monopoly over such matters tightly.

Israel's laws regarding personal status are riddled with inconsistencies. While the state does not recognize interfaith marriages performed in Israel, for purposes of the Law of Return, one need only have one Jewish grandparent to be recognized as a Jew and have unfettered citizenship rights. However, once a person who is recognized as a citizen but does not have a Jewish mother wants to get married, the Chief Rabbinate will then tell them they are not a Jew. This exchange of letters between David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and Isaiah Berlin, one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century, from 1958, recently published in The New Republic, shows how mixed marriage has been a perplexing issue for Israel's issue since its early days.

In the first letter, written by Ben-Gurion, the revered leader asks how the state of Israel should register children of mixed marriages whose mother is not Jewish. The question isn't about citizenship--the Law of Return guarantees that--but about how they should be identified in their identity card, a document every Israeli is required to carry (if an identity card sounds a bit Orwellian or Stalinist, consider the threats Israel faces on most of its borders). There are spaces on the identity card for "Religion" and "Nationality." Ben-Gurion wonders how these children should be classified:

[I]f the mother is non-Jewish and has not been converted, but both she and the father agree that the child shall be Jewish, should he be registered as Jewish on the basis of the expression of the desire of the parents and their declaration in good faith that the child does not belong to another religion, or is any further ceremony of any kind required, in addition to the agreement and the declaration of the parents, for the child to be registered as a Jew?

Ben-Gurion asks Berlin, and other thinkers who have been asked to reflect on the issue, to take into consideration Israel's status as a democracy committed to the concept of equal rights under the law as well as the unique situation in Israel where assimilation is more of a threat to non-Jews than it is to Jews.

In his response, Berlin first states that Israel should only come to Jews outside of Israel on matters of great import and this issue doesn't qualify, but if asked for his opinino by a man as great as Ben-Gurion, he will certainly do so. As a secular liberal, Berlin's personal choice is that anyone who defines themselves as a Jew and can be reasonably shown to have been affiliated with the Jewish community should be able to declare themselves, and their children, Jewish, and be recognized as such by the state. However, recognizing the difficulties such a radical solution might face in Israel, he also suggests the possibility of creating temporary categories of classification. At the same time, however, he says, "nothing would be more iniquitous or ruinous than to permit the emergence of a permanent category of citizens of inferior status--half-Jews, with incomplete civil and political rights; an abominable caricature of anti-Semitic persecution in other countries." Indeed, he says if the religious establishment is too resistant to the "free integration of such persons," then it would be better to bar their immigration than to "expose them to the horrors of minority status."

What price outreach?

Jonathan Tobin, the editor of Philadelphia's Jewish Exponent, has written a thoughtful but flawed column on the debate over intermarriage and outreach funding for the Jerusalem Post.

I don't have a lot of time to respond to his arguments--which are well-thought out and well-argued, as all of Tobin's writing is--but the essential point seems to be that he fears that all the talk of outreach to intermarried families will overshadow the importance of programs that seek to socialize Jews (such as day schools, Jewish summer camps and birthright israel trips), and the Jewish community will suffer. To his credit, he isn't against outreach and he feels that the recent survey results from Boston suggest that outreach may be successful. The problem is, he seems to see the message of outreach--and its primary purveyors, like InterfaithFamily.com--as an exclusive one, a message that seeks to denigrate efforts to encourage inmarriage.

For the record, IFF has never denigrated inmarriage, encouraged intermarriage or criticized inreach programs like he discusses. Neither have the Reform movement, the Reconstructionist movement or the Jewish Outreach Institute, which Tobin presumable would include in the "outreach lobby" he refers to.

But more important than any of our words are the Jewish community's actions. The funding for Jewish day schools, Jewish camping or birthright israel all dwarf the Jewish community's funding for outreach to the intermarried. No more than $3 million a year of the Jewish community's money is spent on dedicated programming for intermarried families; birthright israel alone has a $40 million+ annual budget. Numerous cities in recent years have seen donations greater than $3 million to subsidize Jewish day schools. While Tobin may fear a shift in the Jewish community's priorities, we are a long way away--and millions of dollars short--from outreach overtaking inreach on the Jewish community's agenda.

In other news, New Jersey's Jewish Standard has a nice article about Temple Emeth, a Reform synagogue in Teaneck that is doing a series of programs for interfaith couples.

In Israel, the Supreme Court ruled last week that "intermarriage ceremonies performed abroad would be considered valid vis-a-vis inheritance laws" but shot down a district court decision that had "deemed intermarriages legitimate for all purposes," according to Ha'aretz.

Israel, Philadelphia, Detroit

The Nativity Story, about the events leading up to Jesus' birth, is coming out on Friday. We're doing something new with this movie and hopefully others with religious content. We are sending an interfaith couple to see the movie to record their impressions of the movie, in the hope of illuminating how pop culture can mean different things to people of different religious and cultural backgrounds. Look for the review in our web magazine next week.

Israel and American Jews: A Growing Divide?

The editor's column in the Nov. 2 edition of the Canadian Jewish News (not online, unfortunately) made an interesting connection between two studies by the American Jewish Committee. One, titled Teaching about American Jewry in Israeli Education, found that only 14 percent of Israeli schools teach anything about American Jewry; the other, titled Young Jewish Adults in the United States Today, found that only one-third of young Jewish American felt that caring about Israel was important to Jewish identity (Israel placed 11th out of 15 markers of Jewish identity).

Taken together, these two facts suggest that the citizens of Israel and the Jewish citizens of the U.S. are drifting apart and prophesy a future where Jewish-Americans feel a much lower level of connection to Israel.

What's interesting is that the one-third figure is not that different from the level of attachment to Israel among young adults from interfaith families. According to a 2005 study by the Jewish Outreach Institute on identity in children of interfaith families, 27 percent of 22- to 30-year-olds with one Jewish parent said being Jewish involves caring about Israel "a lot." Critics of intermarriage often point to the weakened Jewish identity of interfaith children as proof that intermarriage is detrimental to the Jewish community, but it appears that a low level of attachment to Israel is a community-wide problem.

Nonetheless, the decreased level of connection between the two countries' Jewish communities is worrying. It's also hard to imagine what more the American Jewish community could do to foster connection to Israel; between birthright israel, the massive fundraising by Jewish federations and the indoctrination of the importance of Israel at all levels of Jewish education, the American Jewish community seems to be doing everything it can already. I suspect, however, that being more welcoming to interfaith families might help nudge up the levels of Zionism among children from interfaith backgrounds.

As for Israel, I don't know enough about their educational system to offer any ideas, but I do know their rules on burial and marriage aren't very welcoming to children from interfaith families where the mother isn't Jewish.

Making Intermarriage Legal in Israel

Israeli leaders like Binyamin Netanyahu sometimes excoriate intermarriage as a grave threat to the Jewish people, which is easy to do in a country with a majority Jewish population. But Israel also has another leg up on preventing intermarriage: a Jew cannot legally marry a non-Jew in Israel.

According to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, a number of mixed and non-Jewish couples are suing the state to compensate them for their "expense and anguish" because they have to travel out of the country to get married. Under Israeli law, only a man and woman of the same religion can marry each other, and they can only get married by an official religious authority. In Israel, the official Jewish religious authority is Orthodox. Unlike in the U.S., there is no such thing as civil marriage by someone other than a rabbi, priest or imam.

The article highlights the case of Dimitri and Inessa Yakubovich. Both of Inessa's parents are Jewish but Dimitri's mother is not, which makes him a non-Jew according to Israeli law. Despite both serving in the Israel Defense Forces, they could not get married in Israel, so they traveled to Bulgaria for a small wedding.

The Knesset is currently considering a bill that would allow for civil marriage of two people without religious classification, but the bill does nothing to address the problem faced by the Yakuboviches. According to an article in the Jewish Week, Rabbi Gilad Kirav, associate director of the Reform movement's Israel Religious Action Center, "said the bill would only help the approximately 70 Israeli couples without religious classification who go abroad every year to get married. Meanwhile, he said, thousands of others are forced to go to Cyprus to get married."

It is problematic from an American point of view when two people who put their lives on the line for Israel, and who would both be considered Jewish by a significant portion of American Jews, cannot legally marry in Israel.

In Israel the size of the Jewish population presumably will always guarantee that intermarriage remains infrequent, so prohibiting a Jew from marrying a non-Jew hardly seems necessary.

Intermarriage Does Not Equal Assimilation

Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel's Likkud party, was reported in an article in the Jerusalem Post to have said that there is no future for Jewish life outside of Israel because of "assimilation and intermarriage." Netanyahu clarifies that he didn't say that; what he says he said was that there is no future for Jewish life in the Diaspora without the state of Israel. But he still says "we have lost countless Jews in the Diaspora to assimilation and intermarriage."

It is a terrible mistake for Jewish leaders like Netanyahu to equate assimilation and intermarriage, for reasons which I tried to explain--succinctly--in this letter to the editor of the Jerusalem Post:

Binyamin Netanyahu is wrong to equate assimilation and intermarriage. It is correct to say that many Jews have been lost in the Diaspora because of assimilation, which means giving up participation and engagement in Jewish life. But many intermarried families in North America are not assimilated--they are actively participating and enaging in Jewish life, and enriching the Jewish community.

It is very important that Jewish leaders not demean intermarriage. In San Francisco's latest demographic study, more interfaith families were found to raise their children as Jews than nationally; the author of the study concluded that it was because of welcoming outreach attitudes and programs. I expect that the results of Boston's demographic study, coming soon, will show the same. But intermarried families will not willingly enter the Jewish community if they hear intermarriage disparaged as a negative loss by leaders like Netanyahu.