Knesset Debates Key Question: ‘Who Is a Jew?’

Stephen Axinn’s eyes still get misty and his voice still quavers with emotion as he recalls the day last April when his 13-year old daughter, adopted as an infant from the streets of Seoul, South Korea, stepped out of a New York mikvah, or ritual bath, to be welcomed as a convert to Judaism.

Axinn, a senior partner in a New York law firm, gropes for words to describe his pride and love at that moment, even as the broad smile on his face speaks much more eloquently. He relates how his daughter, the former Kim Sil Ji, spent months learning Hebrew and Jewish history and customs and swore an oath on the Torah to be a “daughter of the covenant” between God and his biblical chosen people.

It was all done according to the Halakha--Jewish law and commentary set down centuries ago. However, “Jill” Axinn’s conversion was supervised by a Conservative rabbi.

Status in Question Because of that, her status in Israel would be thrown into question under proposed legislation that comes before the Jewish state’s Parliament, the Knesset, today.

“If this law passes, according to the State of Israel, she’s not Jewish anymore,” Axinn said, his tone changing. “And her children won’t be Jewish.”

While he has considered emigrating to Israel, he said, “clearly I’m not coming if my child is not welcome here.”

The depth of Axinn’s bitterness underlines the powerful undercurrents of what would on the surface appear to be a minor legal change applicable to only a handful of would-be immigrants.

In reality, though, American Jewish leaders and leading Israeli politicians from Prime Minister Shimon Peres on down say the change threatens what one called a “disastrous” rupture in relations between the Jewish state and the Diaspora Jews--those who live outside Israel--who provide it with vital political and economic support.

At issue is an amendment to Israel’s so-called Law of Return, which guarantees citizenship to any Jew who claims it. Known popularly as the “Who is a Jew?” bill, the amendment would define as Jewish, for citizenship purposes, only those converts whose conversion was “according to Halakha,” which in Israel is defined exclusively by Orthodox rabbis.

In practice, all sides agree, the change would only affect about half a dozen individuals each year--would-be immigrants whose conversions were supervised by Reform or Conservative rabbis and who therefore would have to go through the process again under Orthodox auspices.

Thus, the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, which sympathizes with the proposed amendment, compared the current fuss with a hair-splitting argument over the sex of angels that Jewish scholars in Constantinople conducted on the eve of a Turkish invasion.

To Reform and Conservative Jews, though, the debate is no laughing matter. To them, the amendment represents nothing less than an attempt by Israel’s Orthodox establishment to manipulate the Knesset into declaring all who are not Orthodox to be second-class Jews.

3 Branches of Judaism

Judaism split into three main streams in the 19th Century. The Reform movement--which one rabbi here called “the equivalent, 300 years later, of the Protestant Reformation”--began in Hamburg, Germany, at the time of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Forty years later, scholars at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), felt that the reformers had gone too far. They sowed the seeds of a third stream, which became known as the Conservative movement. It fits somewhere between Reform and Orthodox in the strictness of its adherence to Jewish tradition as set down in the Torah.

The United States is home to about half the world’s 12 million Jews and is the heartland of the Reform and Conservative movements, noted David Clayman, director of the Israel office of the American Jewish Congress. Of those American Jews affiliated with a synagogue (about 3 million), 85% are either Reform or Conservative.

In addition, the vast majority of the 150,000 Americans who have converted to Judaism in the last decade are not Orthodox, according to Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis. They and their children “will be stigmatized” if the amendment is passed, Kelman said.

Reaction to the proposed amendment among American Jews, who are by far the most generous of Israel’s financial supporters, is therefore particularly strong.

Kelman called it “an attempt to use the Knesset to de-legitimatize the Reform and Conservative movements in America” and “an unconscionable interference in America’s internal Jewish affairs.”

Orthodox Jewish leaders here contend that the whole argument has been blown out of proportion.

“It’s our basic right to decide who is a Jew for the purposes of the State of Israel,” said Avner Sciaky, Knesset member from the National Religious Party. “It (the amendment) doesn’t say a word about who is a Jew in the Diaspora.”

For at least the last 2,000 years, Judaism has discouraged proselytizing, and all three of the major Jewish branches consider conversion a particularly weighty decision. Rabbis are obliged to make at least three serious attempts to dissuade any potential convert in order to weed out all but the most committed.

‘An Unforgivable Sin’ Once a convert is accepted, however, Jewish tradition counts it as “an unforgivable sin” to distinguish him from any other Jew, noted Rabbi Kelman.

If the issues and implications involved in the “who is a Jew?” controversy are complex, they are nothing compared to the politics behind the dispute.

The moving force behind the proposed amendment, for example, is an ultra-Orthodox New York rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, who is known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe and who is spiritual leader of the Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Jews. He refuses to emigrate to Israel, but he nevertheless wields considerable influence among some of Israel’s Orthodox Jews.

Not more than 25% of Israel’s Jews are Orthodox, yet Orthodox political parties wield such disproportionate political power that they can force the issue before a reluctant Knesset and have a good chance of prevailing. That is because none of Israel’s secular political parties can win a majority in elections and must rely on the small religious parties to form ruling coalitions. The religious parties dictate a high political price for such arrangements.

Today’s Vote a First Test Today’s vote is a first test for the amendment. A majority in favor would advance the bill to the next stage of the legislative process. That would not mean passage, but Prime Minister Peres still considered the issue so explosive that he tried desperately--but unsuccessfully--to prevent even a preliminary Knesset test.

Ironically, the “who is a Jew?” issue is considered so close a call that the deciding votes in the Knesset may well be those of eight Arab lawmakers, some of whom have said they will support the religious parties in return for concessions to Israeli Arabs.

Explaining the upcoming vote to foreign reporters, the prime minister sounded almost apologetic as he said, “You know, religious issues are from time to time more difficult than economic ones.”