c. 1999 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ When Natan Sharansky’s Russian immigrant party, Israel B’Aliyah, took to the airwaves recently with election ads slamming the ultra-Orthodox Shas movement’s political grip over Israel’s all-powerful Interior Ministry, the bold attack quickly made headlines. Even native-born Israelis began mouthing the words of the Russian slogan:”Shas control, Nyet.” But what was really at stake _ as everyone soon quickly grasped _ was a potent new challenge by the enormous constituency of Russian Jewish immigrants to the status quo in relations between religion and state.

The upcoming May 17 Israeli general election has catapulted a number of long-simmering social issues to the top of the political agenda in a country generally obsessed with the Arab-Israeli conflict. In particular, complaints from secular Jews about the maltreatment they endure at the hands of state-appointed rabbis and religious politicians is making campaign headlines.”The religious issue is more central than it has ever been in an election campaign in Israel,”said Yehudit Orbach, head of the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University.

The engine driving the political revolution is the Russian immigrant community, Orbach added. The community, numbering about 1 million immigrants who arrived mostly in the 1990s, has finally”matured enough and feels strong enough to make demands and get them onto the national agenda.” In the tight and unpredictable race for prime minister between Labor leader Ehud Barak and incumbent Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Russians, who constitute about 20 percent of the voting public, are seen as swing voters who could decide the election’s outcome.

The Israel B’Aliyah party has sought to cash in on its electoral power by making demands for changes in the status quo at the all-powerful Interior Ministry, which controls immigration procedures for new Israelis, and according to many Russians, makes their lives miserable.

Israel B’Aliyah’s hard-hitting Russian language television ads also have zeroed in for the first time ever on the humiliations many new immigrants are subjected to at the hands of the ultra-Orthodox authorities, who do not regard many of the newcomers as Jewish according to Orthodox religious law.

Emotional interviews with immigrants, screened in the political campaign, report how the children of a well-known Russian Jewish musician were forced to undergo blood tests by bureaucrats to prove their lineage. In other cases, relatives of the immigrants _ such as spouses, parents and children from former marriages _ have been forced to leave the country because they couldn’t qualify as Jewish.

Riding the controversy’s coattails, two veteran Israeli left-wing parties, Meretz and Shinui, have begun to attack the Orthodox politicians on another front by campaigning for the legalization of civil marriage in Israel.

Meretz, in its television commercials, has been portraying the plight of an elderly couple who couldn’t attend their son’s wedding. The young man chose a civil marriage abroad in nearby Cyprus, an option chosen by many young Israelis who prefer not to undergo a religious ceremony. “We as an enlightened people complain about ultra-Orthodox blackmail, but we don’t do anything. We want to vote for a state where the majority decides, not the rabbi decides,”said Yossi Lapid, of the Shinui party, in yet another political commercial. Lapid, a Holocaust survivor and veteran journalist, has become one of the most outspoken critics of the current religious-state status quo.

In the Labor party campaign, meanwhile, Barak has promised, if elected, to remove Shas bureaucrats from their positions of power in the Interior Ministry, and overhaul policies toward the tens of thousands of immigrants entitled to immigrate according to Israeli law, but who are treated as second-class citizens by rabbinical authorities once they arrive.

Appearing before a group of 2,500 immigrants in Haifa, Barak described how he had hosted an immigrant soldier of mixed Jewish-Russian ancestry, named Yevgeny Zhelonkin, for Passover dinner. Zhelonkin’s mother was deported by the Interior Ministry because she isn’t Jewish.”In a government headed by me there will be no situation in which Yevgeny is good enough to serve in the Israeli Air Force, but his mother, who raised him alone in Vladivostok, is expelled,”Barak declared.

The resonance generated by the debate over religion and state appears to have caught the Netanyahu campaign largely off guard.

In particular, the rift between two traditional allies, the Russian immigrants and the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, has grown so deep that it is undermining the political coalition of”disaffected”Israelis who helped bring Netanyahu to victory in 1996.

Public bickering and name-calling between Shas, which largely represents Sephardic Jews from Arab nations, and Israel B’Aliyah politicians reached a peak when Shas Interior Minister Eli Suissa referred to Russian immigrants as”eaters of pork,”suppliers of”call girls”and people who”pray in churches.” Suissa retracted his remarks after Netanyahu intervened. But political mediation is unlikely to bridge the immense cultural rift the present campaign has revealed.

While many Sephardic Jews support religious parties even if they do not personally observe Orthodox Jewish law, Russian Jews are overwhelmingly secular in their outlook, and about 25 percent aren’t even regarded as Jewish by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment.

According to a brand-new survey of the Russian public conducted by the Reform movement’s Israeli branch, 71 percent of new Russian immigrants support a complete separation of church and state, particularly with regard to conversion, marriage and divorce. Nearly 40 percent of the immigrants say they view positively the development of the more liberal Reform and the Conservative movements in Israel.

Yet it also seems clear that the long-term social upheaval inspired by the current political campaign is only at its beginning stage. “Do the Russian immigrant parties present an alternative comprehensive vision of what Israeli society should be in terms of religion and state? I suggest that they don’t,”said Rabbi Uri Regev, of the Reform movement’s Israel Religious Action Center.”They haven’t come to grips with the problems like civil marriage and certainly not conversion.” Leading Russian immigrant politicians are largely right-wing in political outlook vis a vis the Israeli-Arab peace process, and that implies a need to continue some sort of alliance with the religious right.

In addition, a significant percentage of the more veteran immigrant leaders _ who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s _ are themselves Orthodox in religious practice, in contrast to the more secularized newcomers of the 1990s, who constitute the bulk of Russian immigrants.

Still, it’s clear that the Russian immigrant public is becoming impatient with the existing status quo at a faster pace than are native-born Israelis. “The suffering is real. It’s a burning issue, it’s not theoretical,”said Anna Isakova, a prominent Russian journalist and physician who recently joined the Barak campaign. “There are the problems of mixed families who have parents that can’t come to visit children here because the parents aren’t considered Jewish,”she said.”You have Jews who are subjected to all sorts of tests to prove their identity. And in order to have a non-Jewish Russian friend visit you here you have to cross the seven steps of Gehinnom (hell).”Israel is only just now beginning to understand that it has gotten an immigration that has expectations which are very different than what was expected of them.”

IR END FLETCHER