Ron Breiman argues Make conversion easier. He’s got a point.
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The latest conversion bill again placed on the public agenda an important and fateful problem, which for some reason encounters the shallowness of inter-party considerations, while having momentous implications for the face of the Jewish people in Israel and abroad, as well as for Israel’s demographic problem.
Entrusting the conversion of these hundreds of thousands of people, who express their wish to join the Jewish people through their actions, in the hands of a Chief Rabbinate that increasingly shuns Zionism and moves closer to the haredi world, as well as the latter’s demand that converts adopt an Orthodox lifestyle, conveys a message to these people of being second-class citizens and third-class Jews.
Our guideline should be to make the conversion process more lenient, simpler, and quicker, rather than introducing obstacles and forcing converts of all people to adopt a lifestyle that is undesirable by most of Israel’s citizens. Such harsh policy pushes them away instead of bringing them closer, outrages them instead of appeasing them, and conveys a sense of distortion: What we see is growing haredi takeover of the conversion apparatus – while haredim dodge IDF service – thereby harming a large population group that contributes to the IDF and to society despite the alienating attitude towards it.
I fully support this view. The orthodox can be as restrictive as they want. If they choose to not acknowledge the Jewish credentials of converts by Reform or Conservative standards that is their business and most of us couldn’t care less.
We embrace anyone who has met the lower standards and recognize what a big step conversion is in this time of great antisemitism. We don’t saY THEY ARE halachicly Jewish but we do accept them into the clan. They become part of the Jewish people even if the orthodox reject them. If one pof these people want to become an orthodox Jews they can always convert again according to halacha.
Dr. Ron Breiman is the former chairman of Professors for a Strong Israel
Rongrand… I’m one of those people who hates meetings of any kind. Any meeting consisting of more than one person is to be shunned. And I’m not even sure about that one person.
6 opinions.
Wouldn’t work, 3 Jews 5 opinions.
Shows you how much I know. It was my belief that all Jews were Jewish. Make any sense.
Just maybe that is the problem, too many splinter groups going in different directions.
Because by any definition based on Jewish sources they aren’t Jews!!! And why they should support us? Can’t think of a single reason, so go fuck yourselves.
It is diaspora Jews who have removed themselves from Judaism not Jews here denying them the status of Jews. If your not a Jew, you’re not a Jew and we have a long tradition of how you non Jews can join up. You rejected that already with the reform movement and look what it brought you in 2-3 generations. Your ways have failed and will continue to fail because you reject authentic Judaism. So I recommend you starting a new religion and you can call it whatever you want except Judaism.
So what? Isn’t that pretty much what we have today?
By the way Judaism is not plauralistic, never was and is a contradiction of terms. Judaism is particularist.
You guys lack one critical argument. You are not here and therefore don’t vote. You fools have created quite the conundrum for yourselves where money will take you just so far. You are losing almost 100 Jews a day to assimilation and you want to bring it here? Kop a hike!!
I’m laughing 🙂 The government is more impressed with the prospect of losing coalition majority. You don’t stand a chance against that.
The American Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements have condemned Israeli conversion reform. Unnecessarily liberal as the new law is, it is still insufficiently liberal for these atheist ‘rabbis.’
They want Israel to recognize Reform conversions, which are about as substantial as declarations of ‘Allah Akbar!’ and conservative conversions which teach Jewish tradition more than Jewish religion.
The American ‘rabbis’ want the simplest conversion to gloss over the mind-boggling intermarriage rate. Indeed, why not intermarry if, as those blind guides claim, our religion is merely about ethics? Christian spouses are perfectly ethical.
The debate over summary conversion in Israel is misplaced. The real question is not, how to make a bad Jew out of good Gentile, but how to make Jews…Jews. The government deliberately made the problem irresolvable by abrogating the use of religion for ID papers. Officiating rabbis desperately try to prevent assimilation by requesting all kinds of corroborating evidence from marrying couples, usually Soviet-era documents which specified religion/nationality. The second generation of Russian Israelis won’t keep their parents’ Soviet papers, and there will be no way to check their Jewishness in most cases.
The debate over conversion procedures is nonsensical: in the atheist state of Israel, Slavs feel themselves perfectly comfortable and won’t convert to Judaism even under the most simplified procedures.
Religious parties oppose a provision of the bill which authorizes any three local rabbis to form a band and start authorizing conversions. Such an arrangement would encourage prospective converts to shop for the most lenient rabbis—who would be in no short supply.
The bill, sensibly enough, closes the conversion loophole to illegal immigrants, who would of course convert for economic reasons. That provision will be opposed by leftists, who love the illegals.
In any case, very few people want to convert. Since the state is not practically Jewish, they are comfortable with their current religious status.
The army has already created its own Jews by instituting a three-month conversion. Nativ is the most simple giyur program. Run by the IDF rabbinate, it offers conversion to Judaism in less than half a year—which is below even Reformist “Allah Akbar” standards. Not that the idea is entirely bad: presumably, the people who serve in the IDF come really close to joining the Jewish nation.
Nativ published some shocking figures. In its seven years of operation, about 7,000 soldiers entered the program…but only 3,100 passed the most simple conversion imaginable. Indeed, after the government dropped nationality and religion from all the official documents, Israeli Slavs have little reason to become Jewish.
Government officials routinely slam the Orthodox Rabbinate for its “inability” to convert the hundreds of thousands of Slavs the government allowed into Israel.
The Jews who ignore their Jewishness to the point of marrying unconverted Gentiles should not be allowed into Israel. A Gentile, married or not, who was ever overheard offending the Jewish nation, should be stripped of Israeli citizenship and deported on the grounds that he faked loyalty to the state when applying for citizenship. Beating a person for anti-Semitic pronouncements should be reduced to misdemeanor punishable by minor fine. Jews got a huge share of atheists so that the traditional religious definition of Jewishness became unworkable. Atheist Diaspora Jews are already lost, and good riddance: by intermarrying, they betrayed their brethren who perished in the Holocaust. Assimilated Jews abrogated their first responsibility to their murdered compatriots, to restore their seed. It’s different with Israeli Jews and semi-Jews: living in a Jewish environment, even the atheists don’t routinely assimilate.
My solution: Rather than distilling Jews from Israelis, we should ban non-Jewishness. The ban would equally apply to Jews and Gentiles alike. In times of old, foreigners could only reside in the Land of Israel with the status of ger, a de facto convert.
Several of the commandments exist to expunge non-Jewishness from the Land of Israel. No one can work on Shabbat or keep leaven on Pesach “in your towns,” eat blood or animals slaughtered in a non-kosher manner, or commit sexual immorality. Foreign worship, idolatrous statues, icons, and practices are proscribed from this land. Once Israel enforces the basic commandments, the problem of non-Jews would fade away. If they want to live in the Land of Israel, risk their lives, observe basic commandments, abandon foreign worship, pass for Jews, and marry Jews, then we have no reason to consider their children non-Jewish. This is not an innovation, but a return to the traditional practice, which did not know conversion but relied on de facto Jewishness.
The ger option is closed to Arabs: the Torah commands us to leave no native in the Land of Israel because they would always hate us for robbing them of their country.
I’ve been saying for years that conversion should be far easier, and certainly not dependent on arbitrary standards set by mainly Ashkenazi Jews (of which I happen to be one).
I always ask the question, “What would Abraham have done?” Never yet received a viable answer. The truth is that Abraham (and perhaps Isaac and Jacob) would not be regarded as Jews today, despite their closeness to the One God.
As the Baal Shem Tov is reported to have said, “The Talmudic scholars are so busy, so intent, on studying, that they have completely forgotten about God.” What made Abraham so different in his native environment is the fact that he acknowledged the Existence of only One God. Surely that’s the most important criterion (though not necessarily the only one) for conversion, particularly in a world gone mad with pagan and atheistic ideas… even in the churches it seems.
In other words, perhaps we Jews should be encouraging a return to the One God, rather than discouraging it.
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