c. 1998 Religion News Service

TEL AVIV _ They were a chic Israeli-American couple set to wed here with a champagne dinner in the lush surroundings of this seaside city’s botanical gardens. Yet a last-minute glitch _ the Orthodox rabbis marrying them demanded written proof the American bride was Jewish _ nearly scuttled the ceremony to which hundreds of guests were invited.

Half a century after the creation of Israel, a single thread binds together Tel Aviv’s jean-clad secular Jewish yuppies and Jerusalem’s black-coated ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom religious tradition guides every move.

Both groups are birthed, married, divorced and buried according to the ancient Jewish legal code recognized as binding law by whatever government has held power here since the Middle Ages.

Yet as Israel celebrates its 50th anniversary _ and its evolution from a spartan, agrarian society to an economic powerhouse of high-tech companies and shopping malls _ a rising chorus of voices is calling for change in the nation’s system of religious law, which is virtually unique in the developed world.

Key among those voices are the maverick, leftist parliamentarian Yossi Beilin and his Orthodox colleague Alex Lubotzky, who recently joined in unveiling a proposal for a new”covenant”between religion and state that would shake up _ but not abolish _ Israel’s religious status quo.

Yet that status quo _ with roots in medieval Ottoman law and custom, as well as a pre-independence pact between secular Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion and ultra-Orthodox rabbis _ has proven amazingly resilient to change, even among Israelis of the MTV generation.

In fact, despite the inequities existing in how religious laws are applied to the rich and poor and men and women, many say the revolution in thinking about religion and state here has barely begun _ and could well last another half century.

One of the ironies of Israel’s birth as a modern state in 1948 is that although its socialist founders aspired to create a democracy, they never envisioned an American-style system in which religion and state are kept completely separate.”David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister) was completely secular, but he believed that religion had played an important role in Jewish history and was crucial to social unity,”said Eliezer Don-Yehiya, a professor of Israeli political history at Bar-Ilan University.

Indeed, in June 1947 as the 650,000 Jews of Palestine waited anxiously to hear if the United Nations would recommend creation of a Jewish state, Ben-Gurion sent a secret letter to leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis seeking support for the Zionist enterprise.

In exchange, Ben-Gurion promised that Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders in the new state of Israel would continue to arbitrate issues of marriage and divorce for their respective communities _ just as they had under British and Ottoman rule.

Public offices would observe Jewish dietary laws, and close on the Sabbath _ as had Jewish communal institutions such as the public bus system in pre-state days. Likewise, he promised religious schools, while state-supported, would remain administratively autonomous, as they had in the British mandate period.

Those commitments _ later dubbed the”status quo”_ set out the pattern for Israeli religious life over the next five decades. Even today, the silent majority of Jewish Israelis are married and buried by Orthodox clerics _ such as the young couple wed at the Tel Aviv botanical gardens _ even though they may not give a moment’s thought to religion in the intervening years.”I think my generation accepted many of the restrictions imposed on us by the rabbis because we were a generation of children who had been born of Holocaust survivors,”Beilin said of the status quo.”We agreed to get married with an Orthodox rabbi because we understood that we had to make concessions in order for Jews to build a nation together. But I don’t think the same concessions will be accepted by our children.” In fact, what has evolved, over the years, is a double standard of religious and civil laws under which affluent Israelis increasingly buy their way out of the system.

Public transportation shuts down Friday evening for the Sabbath, but those who can afford it simply get in their private cars and head for the beach or elsewhere. Left at home are the poor, elderly and children with no way of getting anywhere _ other than walking to a nearby synagogue or park _ during the Sabbath period.

Similarly, secular Israelis who can afford the plane fare to Cyprus, Europe or the United States, increasingly are choosing civil marriages abroad that are subsequently recognized by the state, rather than a religious ceremony at home.

Most striking, perhaps, is the disparate treatment women and men receive in religious courts dealing with family law and divorce, said Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a Yale-trained lecturer in family law at Bar-Ilan University.

She noted that affluent women deprived of a fair divorce property settlement by a religious court tend to appeal to the civil courts _ appeals that are expensive and not always available to the poor.

Such glaring inequities have galvanized younger Israelis who are increasingly calling for change.”The system today lends itself to abuse,”said Halperin-Kaddari, who is herself religious.”Over the last 100 years the Jewish law has reached a point of stagnation, and … has not been adapted to the needs and requirements of people today.” A minority of Israeli leaders has called for a complete separation of church and state, including the head of the Jewish Agency, Avraham Burg, himself observant. They argue that the current system both discriminates among Jews and has created different standards for Muslims, Christians and Jews _ all of whom may be Israeli citizens.

Some secular Israelis, meanwhile, have opted to challenge the status quo on the cultural front _ seeking to provide their peers with a liberal interpretation of Jewish thought and traditions.”We want Orthodox leaders to get off our backs, quit being paternalistic,”said Ruth Calderon, who founded the innovative Alma Hebrew College to teach Jewish thought and philosophy in a secular framework to a generation of Israelis largely ignorant of the classical sources.

Even some younger Orthodox clerics have decided change is needed. Rabbi Naftali Rothenberg, from the Jerusalem suburb of Har Adar, leads a group of several dozen community rabbis calling for the creation of civil marriage in Israel.”The government has an obligation to marry and bury people,”said Rothenberg, noting that thousands of Israelis, many of them new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, cannot marry today in Israel because Orthodox Jewish law does not recognize them as Jews because of past intermarriage in their families.

But it is Beilin and Lubotzky who have put forward the most comprehensive proposal for change.

Their proposed”covenant”on religion and state would, for instance, create an Israeli contract for”cohabitation”_ which is more accepted in Israel than the United States _ as an alternative to a conventional wedding. They also propose legislation that would draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students for national service, from which they so far have been exempt.

In addition, their proposal would permit more public transportation lines, cultural and recreational centers to remain open on the Jewish Sabbath _ although existing”blue laws”would be applied even more vigorously to commerce and industry.

Finally, Beilin and Lubotzky want to revamp the teaching of Jewish topics in the state secular school system, where students today are exposed to little more than the Bible.”I’d prefer that people learn more from the Jewish bookcase while they are alive, rather than be forced to be buried in a Jewish casket when they die,”said Lubotzky, referring to the fact that until recently Orthodox rabbis also had a hegemony over burial ceremonies.

Lubotzky, himself an internationally renowned mathematician, said he began thinking about the need for a reform of Israel’s religious laws after becoming involved in attempts to quell a still-unresolved controversy over demands for state recognition of non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism _ the”who is a Jew?”flap continuing to receive widespread attention among American Reform and Conservative Jews.

While many Israeli figures have lauded the attempt to rethink the relationship between religion and state, most observers are equally doubtful reform will come quickly or easily.

Since the operative word in the Beilin-Lubotzky proposal is compromise, almost every interest group and lobby reviewing the document has come away thinking their side has been short-changed.”The idea of a new covenant is encouraging. But on the one hand, it probably goes too far to have a chance of succeeding right now, and at the same time, it doesn’t go far enough,”said Halperin-Kaddari.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS.)

As in the United States _ where courts, rather than legislatures, have often made landmark decisions on religious limits and freedoms _ Israel’s courts are becoming powerful players in the current system. Bar-Ilan’s Don-Yehiya said reforms are more likely to occur incrementally via court decisions, rather than dramatically as a result of legislation.

Yet as Israeli society changes, so do Jewish religious practice here _ sometimes in defiance of the law.”The status quo is a misleading concept. In fact there are always changes, but they are happening on the margins,”said Don-Yehiya.

Half a century ago, for instance, movie theaters and cafes were closed on the Sabbath in Tel Aviv. Today, unlike almost anywhere else in the country, Tel Aviv’s cafes and theaters are open Saturdays _ a symbol of the city’s post-Zionist consumer society.

Said Don-Yehiya:”The law hasn’t changed but the reality has.”

DEA END FLETCHER