Saturday, October 30, 2010

Fearful "non-Jews being assimilated into Jewish people" using "fraudulent apparatus," racist rabbis launch Gentile-phobic inquisition

From:
Israeli Conversion Crisis Escalates: All Conversions Now Under Review

(Forward) -- by Nathan Jeffay --

TEL AVIV — Israel’s Chief Rabbinate has hoisted a question mark over the legitimacy of all conversions performed in the country since at least 1999.

This constitutes the deepening of a crisis that began on September 6, when a representative of Israel’s Attorney General raised doubts about the legitimacy of conversions performed under the auspices of the country’s military.

Initially, it looked as if the Chief Rabbinate was going to nip the crisis in the bud by declaring that whatever procedural problems the Attorney General’s office had uncovered, it stands behind the military conversions. But in an apparent about-turn in late October, it has ordered a review of all conversions — not only military but also civilian...

The new uncertainty threatens the conversions of thousands of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union and their children, in particular. Many of them qualified for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, which allows anyone with one Jewish grandparent to come to the country and become a citizen. That standard, however, does not satisfy the Chief Rabbinate, which presides over personal status issues such as marriage and divorce in Israel. Without a formal and accepted conversion, many immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not Jewish according to Orthodox Jewish religious law encounter obstacles to getting married, divorced and even buried in a Jewish cemetery...

Ironically, this saga began with a petition to a secular court that was meant to ease the problems faced by converts. Farber, the ITIM director, had asked the court to end the situation whereby some hard-line local rabbis who consider conversion standards too lax refuse to issue marriage licenses to converts who come to them for marriage registration. The local rabbis issue such licenses in their capacity as local agents of the Chief Rabbinate.

Until now, the Chief Rabbinate had stood by the Conversion Authority’s conversions. But its deferral of the issue to a special committee with a charge of looking at all conversions gives a boost to ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leaders seeking to cast doubt on the Conversion Authority’s actions...

Lawmaker David Rotem, chairman of the Knesset’s Law Committee, told the Forward he plans to stop the Chief Rabbinate’s plan. He has submitted a new bill that would deem the military conversions legally valid whatever the Chief Rabbinate claims and despite any objections of the State Attorney. But for Israel’s Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, leadership, the latest development is a triumph — and the result of a high-profile campaign against what its media routinely call “false conversion.” When it looked like Amar might back military conversions, Yated Ne’eman, a newspaper of the Haredi establishment, described this as “another worrisome move toward granting this fraudulent apparatus a seal of approval and enabling thousands of non-Jews to be assimilated into the Jewish people under the guise of Jews, after receiving a fictitious ‘conversion certificate’ not worth the paper it’s written on.”...MORE...LINK
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