c. 1997 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Thirty years ago, Rabbi Philip Spectre immigrated to Israel from Buffalo, N.Y., and now his Israeli-born daughter is planning to wed. But Spectre, executive director of Israel’s small Conservative Judaism movement, will not perform the ceremony because under the Jewish state’s laws he is not recognized as a rabbi.

To get around that _ and because Israeli civil law validates all weddings performed outside the country _ Spectre is arranging a civil ceremony for his daughter on the nearby island of Cyprus.

It’s a strategy used by many Israeli Jews to avoid dealing with Israel’s Orthodox Jewish establishment.”The irony of having to oppose other rabbis has not been lost on me,”Spectre said.

Spectre’s predicament exemplifies the religious tensions tearing at Israeli Jewish society, pitting Orthodox against non-Orthodox Jews. American Jews _ who are overwhelmingly non-Orthodox _ have become embroiled in the dispute, viewing Orthodox attempts to extend their religious authority as an effort to delegitimatize the liberal Conservative and Reform Jewish movements.

The roots of the controversy can be traced to decisions made at the time of Israel’s founding _ and even further back to the policies of the Ottoman Empire.

In Israel, matters of”personal status,”including marriage, are controlled by religious authorities. For Jews, who make up 85 percent of Israel’s 5.8 million population, that means the Orthodox rabbinate.

Conservative and Reform Judaism, which in the United States represent 90 percent of synagogue-affiliated Jews, are not recognized in Israel as legitimate religious alternatives, and civil marriage does not exist.”Israel is the only country in the free world,”said Rabbi Uri Regev, the Israeli-born director of the Reform Israel Action Center,”where Reform and Conservative rabbis cannot officiate at weddings.” But to much of Israel’s Orthodox establishment, Reform and Conservative Judaism represent false and dangerous alternatives. Conservative Judaism generally upholds traditional Jewish law and practice, with some significant exceptions, such as its ordaining of women. However, Reform Judaism rejects the authority of Jewish law in favor of free choice guided by tradition.

Orthodox Jews particularly abhor Reform Judaism’s denial of the divine origin of the Bible, its declaration of patrilineal descent as sufficient to determine the Jewishness of a child, and its acceptance of gays and interfaith couples.”The Reform deny God and his laws and they are more abominable than the creator of Christianity, who believed in the creator of the world, respecting the Sabbath and observing other laws,”said Orthodox Rabbi David Shalosh, chief rabbi of Netanya, an Israeli coastal city north of Tel Aviv.

The Orthodox unwillingness to recognize Spectre and other non-Orthodox rabbis is part of a larger struggle taking place in Israel to shape the nation’s religious character.

Recent flashpoints in that struggle have included battles over Sabbath street closings; women’s prayer groups at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site; and the acceptability of non-Orthodox conversions.

A bill in the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, to formally invalidate non-Orthodox conversions conducted in Israel has so angered American Conservative and Reform leaders that they have called for an economic boycott of groups opposing recognition of non-Orthodox movements in Israel.

Israel was founded as both a Jewish homeland and a secular democracy. It operates under a system in which Orthodox Judaism is akin to an official”church,”and there is no clear separation of religious and secular spheres as there is in the United States.

To win the political backing of Orthodox leaders, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, agreed in 1948 to a”status quo”agreement giving them great influence over key aspects of public education, dietary laws, the Sabbath and family law.

As a result, Judaism’s dietary laws are observed today by all government institutions, including the army; public transportation is still banned on the Jewish Sabbath in some cities; virtually all Jewish-owned businesses must close on the Sabbath; and the government funds seminaries and other religious institutions and services.

In addition, ultra-Orthodox seminary students are exempt from serving in the army _ for other Israelis, the primary institution for building a national consciousness.

In 1948, the number of such exemptions was small. Today, it has grown to 30,000 men and has become a cause of tremendous resentment toward the ultra-Orthodox.

Beyond these accommodations, Israel has also retained much of the”millet”system imposed on Palestine during the period of Muslim Ottoman rule, which ended with World War I. Under this arrangement, the Christian and Jewish communities were given jurisdiction over their own members in matters of personal status.

The British continued this system when they took control of Palestine, and it was adopted with little change when Israel became independent in 1948. The Orthodox rabbinate still controls marriage, divorce and burial for all Israeli Jews, even those who personally reject religious observance.

Today, Orthodox political parties hold 23 of 120 seats in the Knesset, adding to their influence on Israeli life.

Not surprisingly, many Israeli Jews _ 75 percent of whom are not Orthodox _ chafe under what many characterize as a system of”religious coercion”by the Orthodox minority.”Anyone can live his life 17th century-style, but I don’t want him to force it on me,”said Jerusalem City Councilman Ornan Yekutieli, a founder of Am Hofshi (“A Free People”), an organization fighting what it sees as Orthodox coercion.

Supported by increasingly angry allies on the Israeli secular left and in the American Jewish community, the small Israeli Reform and Conservative movements have mounted a campaign in the name of”pluralism”to break Orthodoxy’s religious monopoly. The United Jewish Appeal in the United States recently launched a $20 million campaign to promote non-Orthodox Judaism in Israel.

Because they are small, still dependent on financial support from parent organizations in the United States and have a high proportion of English-speaking immigrants, many Israelis reject Conservative and Reform Judaism as foreign imports. Even many secular Israelis who wouldn’t think of entering an Orthodox synagogue equate religious Judaism with Orthodoxy alone.

Nonetheless, surveys indicate more than half of Israel’s Jewish population is neither strictly Orthodox nor completely secular. Rather, it is partly observant, making individual choices about how to practice Judaism.

That prompts leaders of both Reform and Conservative Judaism to believe their movements could grow by leaps and bounds if the Israeli deck were not stacked against them. A prime contributor to this belief has been the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews over the last 20 years.

Many Russian Jews or their spouses are not Jewish by Orthodox standards, creating a host of problems. Under the current situation, the children of these immigrants will not be able to marry or be buried as Jews in Israel because of the Orthodox monopoly. Nor can they convert to Judaism unless they agree to live as Orthodox Jews.

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At the same time, the”status quo”agreement has been eroded by recent court decisions.

Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled Reform and Conservative Jews may not be excluded from local religious councils, which disburse funds for religious services. And a 1988 decision allowed restaurants and places of entertainment, but not other kinds of businesses, to remain open on the Sabbath.

Some observers speak of a new”status quo”developing, one which takes more fully into account both the Jewish and overwhelmingly non-Orthodox character of Israeli life.

On the Orthodox right, however, the opposition to Reform and Conservative Judaism remains venomous. In objecting to the inclusion of a Reform representative on the Netanya religious council, Shalosh, the city’s chief rabbi, said:”According to the law of nature, man does not live together with a snake. Therefore, no religious council in this country has a representative of the Reform in its midst.” Other Orthodox leaders have suggested Reform Judaism should configure itself as a separate religion _ not Judaism _ in order to be recognized by the state, an idea that outrages and saddens Reform Jews.”We are all a movement toward God, rather than away from God,”said Regev, the Israeli Reform leader. He called on Orthodoxy to”cooperate”with Reform and Conservative Jews.

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But not all Orthodox rabbis are unequivocably opposed to granting Conservative and Reform Judaism legitimacy in Israel.

American-born Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, chief rabbi of Efrat, a city of 7,000 just south of Jerusalem, said it is”legitimate for people to pray as they wish and to get married as they wish.””A little bit of competition is positive,”he said, adding he is confident that”ultimately people will choose Orthodoxy.”

MJP END MARGOLIS