Follow our sages, prevent conversion crisis 

By Debbie Israel

May 9, 2008
 

We are now in the period of the year called Sefira. Sefira, which means "counting" in Hebrew, is the seven-week period between Passover and Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks).

This period is marked by mourning because the students of Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest rabbis of all time, started dying. Why were they dying? Well, the most accepted reason taught is that they didn't respect each other. I always wondered why we kept this mourning period. After all, it's now almost 2,000 years later.

But the Israeli Rabbinate succeeded recently in helping me understand why, after all these centuries, we still commemorate this period of time with mourning. They issued a ruling that comes off as spiteful and prejudiced.

What the Israeli Rabbinate, a politically appointed body that acts as a religious authority, did was to call for the nullification of all conversions done since 1999 by the rabbi who is head of the Israeli Conversion Authority. This gives them carte blanche to nullify any conversion if they think the convert isn't keeping the mitzvot to their satisfaction. This could affect upwards of 35,000 to 40,000 individuals and their families. This has the potential of directly affecting the Jewishness of close to 10 percent of the Jewish population of Israel. All this occurred because a women (who was converted by this Rabbi) looking for a get (a Jewish Divorce) was quizzed by the Rabbinate about her observance level and didn't pass their quiz. This led to the Rabbinate deciding to retroactively revoke her conversion, declaring that her children are not Jewish, that her marriage never existed (since her husband, a born Jew, cannot marry a gentile) and that therefore a get was not necessary, and (this is the topper) that because her husband had married a gentile, he could no longer marry a Jew!

In case you're scratching your head over this one, don't feel bad. You're not alone.

According to Torah law, not only are we not permitted to treat converts differently from born Jews, we are not allowed to even ask them if they are converts! This edict, in effect, will cause just the opposite. Converts will be put into a de facto secondary status, always under suspicion and scrutiny. Born Jewish men will not want to marry convert women for fear that, if she is found to be not observant enough, his children will be declared non-Jewish.

This also opens the door for blackmail. A less than savory born Jew can blackmail a convert to do anything from clean their house to give them money "or I'll tell the Rabbinate that you don't keep Shabbat."

Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar has now come out with a statement nullifying this edict.

I suspect that this entire charade is a way of sneaking the original ruling (that of nullifying the conversion of the original woman and thereby ruining not only her life but the life of her ex-husband, who can no longer marry, and her children, who have been raised Jewish and are now told they are not) under the noses of the Jewish world. But even that original ruling has just as negative an effect as the entire edict. Converts will spend their entire lives looking over their shoulders, wondering when the "Shabbat police" will "pull them over" and "give them a ticket" so to speak.

There are opinions that say that once a person converts that person is a Jew forever and nothing they do (including converting "out") can change that. It should, therefore, then be the now fully Jewish person's responsibility to keep the Torah and not to responsibility of the Rabbinate to check on that person.

At issue here is whose version of halakha (Jewish law) need a convert keep. And by passing this edict, the Rabbinate is saying that only their version of Judaism counts.

Why would the Rabbinate take such a drastic step? I wonder if it might not be because a large percentage of the people this rabbi converted were either Falash Mura (Jews from Ethiopia) and people from the former Soviet Union (most of whom had a Jewish father and were considered Jewish by the Soviet Authorities). These were also mostly people who were Zionists who didn't want to convert through the non-Zionist Haredi court system. Sound a bit less than a Torah-based decision to you? It does to me.

The only solution, in my opinion, is to not only overturn this edict -- as Rabbi Amar has offered -- and the original ruling affecting the wife, the husband and their children (since even this ruling will cause a second-class status on converts, a status prohibited by the Torah) but to dissolve this politically appointed and politically motivated Rabbinate.

Here's a radical idea (put forth in no less a source than Pirkei Avot -- Ethics of our Fathers). Why don't we all find ourselves a rabbi we trust and go to him (or, when the time or place allows it, her) for our halakhic decisions? Why don't we rule that once a person converts, that person is a full Jew in perpetuity (no less an authority than Maimonides, in his Mishnah Torah, laws of prohibited marriages, advocates this path)? This is the only way to keep converts (and children of female converts) from becoming second-class citizens.

Debbie Israel is a graphic artist (see https://www.cafepress.com/compugraphd2 for some of her work) and tutor living in Highland Park.