NEWS STORY: Bill barring recognition of non-Orthodox Judaism approved in Israel

c. 1999 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _ Reform and Conservative Jews suffered a major political setback in their campaign for recognition in Israel on Tuesday when a law seeking to bar their participation in local religious councils narrowly won the approval of Israel’s Knesset, or parliament. A tie on the floor of Israel’s Knesset over […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Reform and Conservative Jews suffered a major political setback in their campaign for recognition in Israel on Tuesday when a law seeking to bar their participation in local religious councils narrowly won the approval of Israel’s Knesset, or parliament.

A tie on the floor of Israel’s Knesset over the proposed bill was broken by new Centrist Party candidate for prime minister Yitzhak Mordechai.


A religious traditionalist who had donned a yarmulke and prayed at the Western Wall just before declaring his candidacy on Monday, Mordechai’s vote insured the bill’s passage by a slim 50 to 49 majority.

In a related move, meanwhile, a number of leading Israeli figures denounced a statement by Israel’s Chief Sephardi rabbi comparing the Reform Jewish movement to the World War II Nazi genocide.

Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi Doron had said on Monday that the damage done to the Jewish people by the Reform movement was worse than that of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews perished.

The new law on religious councils, sponsored by the country’s leading Orthodox Jewish religious parties, declares that the municipal committees must operate only according to the instructions and orders of Israel’s Orthodox chief rabbis and that all council members must declare their allegiance to that fundamental principle.

The local boards, which exist in every Israeli city and town, administer religious services such as marriage registration, synagogue funding, and kashrut supervision.

The new law is an attempt to sidestep a recent Supreme Court decision ordering the government to appoint Reform and Conservative representatives to the lay boards where secular as well as Orthodox Jews are already represented.

The leaders of Israel’s tiny Conservative and Reform communities had mobilized American Jews in a public campaign to prevent passage of the proposed law, saying it was yet more evidence of Israel’s tilt towards fundamentalism, and the state’s rejection of liberal Jewish streams.


Passage of the law brought Israel”a step closer to Khomeini’s Iran,”said Rabbi Uri Regev of the Reform Movement. He said the law effectively provides for”sole and comprehensive control of the rabbinate over all matters of Jewish life in the public domain.” But at the same time the Reform and Conservative leaders said they would go ahead and make a perfunctory declaration of loyalty to the orders of the Orthodox Chief rabbis in a bid to keep their new seats on the councils. They added the parliamentary defeat was only a temporary setback in their broader campaign for recognition. “The more the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel grow, the more the Orthodox establishment will be threatened and fight to maintain their monopoly,”said Rabbi Ehud Bandel, president of the Masoreti (Conservative) movement in Israel. Bandel has been appointed as a representative to Jersualem’s religious council, but has never yet attended a council session.”Of course this is a terrible law, and the fact it passed is unfortuate and anti-Zionist because it will cause a rift betwen the vast majority of world Jewry _ who are affiliated with the Conservative and Reform streams _ and the Jewish state,”added Bandel.”But we still intend to sit in the religious councils and declare whatever is necessary to declare according to the new law. After our years of legal battles and victories for seating we are not going to give up so quickly,”Bandel added.

Israel’s Supreme Court recently ordered the government to convene the religious boards in several Israeli cities, regardless of Orthodox opposition, in order to permit the seating of newly appointed Reform and Conservative delegates.

In a series of political skirmishes over the last two weeks, the Reform and Conservative appointees to religious councils in the northern Israeli cities of Haifa and Kiryat Tivon appeared for the first time at scheduled council meetings in fulfillment of the court’s orders. But every session where Reform and Conservative representatives were to appear was either boycotted or summarily cancelled by the Orthodox majority on the religious boards.

Israel’s chief rabbis, meanwhile, held a series of extraordinary meetings in which they instructed Orthodox members of the religious councils, as well as the councils’ paid employees, to boycott the board meetings in which Reform and Conservative members appeared. “We know the terrible number of people who are assimilating in the diaspora … a decline in numbers that is, to our sorrow, greater than what the nation of Israel suffered in the Holocaust … And the one-way road to assimilation is via the Reform movement,”declared Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi Doron after a meeting of leading Orthodox rabbis on the issue Monday.

Bakshi Doron’s remarks were met by a sharp political outcry. Moshe Hirsh, the president of Bar Ilan University, Israel’s most prestigious Orthodox religious institution, described the statement as”intemperate and divisive.”Avraham Burg, the head of the Jewish Agency and an observant Jew himself, also denounced Bakshi-Doron’s statement.

In the United States, the American Jewish Committee said it was”deeply troubled”by the debate.”It is shocking that any Jewish leader, especially a rabbi, would attempt to equate the loss of Jewish identity through assimilation to the Nazi design to destroy the Jewish people.” (OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)


The next stage in the Reform and Conservative battle for recognition will take place on Wednesday when Reform and Conservative members of the religious council in the tiny Galilee town of Kiryat Tivon will attempt to be seated once more on the council.”We’ll give it our best effort, but we are not just going to be there in order to take a beating,”Regev said.”If we feel we can function effectively and constructively we will do so. If we don’t, we will leave and seek alternatives, either challenging the law again in the courts, or creating our own alternative bodies.” Meanwhile, a list of parliamentarians who voted in favor of the bill will be forwarded to Jewish communities in the United States, which threatened earlier to boycott politicians who denied the liberal Jewish streams recognition.

The list includes the name of Mordechai, whose Centrist Party a day earlier had pledged to reconcile the deep political and social rifts in Israeli society.”We are certainly disappointed with the way Yitzhak Mordechai voted,”said Bandel.”I am sure that our people will know how to reward those who voted for pluralism and how not to reward those who voted against us.”

DEA END FLETCHER

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