Israel Bars ‘Convert’ Label on Immigrant Papers

The Israeli Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Interior Ministry may not stamp “convert” in the identity documents of an American immigrant.

The case involved Shoshana Miller, 43, a former Baptist who was converted in 1982 in a Reform Jewish ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colo. She immigrated in 1985 and sought Israeli citizenship under the country’s Law of Return, which guarantees such status to any Jew who requests it.

The Interior Ministry, which traditionally is run by Israel’s Orthodox Jewish Establishment, refused Miller’s request for citizenship because her conversion had not been supervised by an Orthodox rabbi.

When Miller refused a second, Orthodox conversion, the ministry insisted on stamping “convert” in her identity documents as a warning that her conversion might be considered invalid under Jewish law.

Would Be Discrimination

Miller challenged the ministry, and the Supreme Court agreed with her Tuesday that to label her a convert in her identity documents would be an act of discrimination.

“One may not see the term convert, or converted, as anything to do with the description of nationality as described by the law,” according to the decision written by Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar. “There are no two nations--one Jewish and one converted to Judaism.”

Shamgar said that Israel was not created in order to bring about divisions among Jews, and he added, “The nation with which we deal is the Jewish people, which is one.”

Miller, in tears after the verdict, said: “It’s sort of the end of a very bad dream. . . . But I’m so pleased that it went this way, and now I can get on with my life.”

15,000 Converts a Year

About 15,000 Americans convert to Judaism each year, the majority of them with the help of Reform or Conservative rabbis who advance more liberal interpretations of Jewish law than does Orthodox Judaism.

Only a handful of the converts seek Israeli citizenship and are thus directly affected by Tuesday’s ruling, but the decision has a broad emotional and psychological impact.

To Reform and Conservative Jews, the case represents another attempt by Israel’s Orthodox Establishment to question the authority of their rabbis and, in effect, to declare them second-class Jews.

This is a particularly sensitive issue in the United States, which is home to about half of the world’s 12 million Jews. Of the American Jews affiliated with a synagogue, 85% are either Reform or Conservative.

Origin Was Personal

The Miller case became a cause celebre among non-Orthodox Jews, yet Miller said that “it started on a personal basis,” and added, “I had already had a conversion that was valid as far as I was concerned, and I didn’t want to betray that by going through a second conversion.”

Judaism split into three groups in the 19th Century. The Reform movement began in Hamburg, Germany, at the time of Napoleon. Feeling that the reformers had gone too far, scholars at the Jewish Theological Seminary in what was then Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), sowed the seeds of a third group 40 years later. That became known as the Conservative movement, which is somewhere between the Reform and Orthodox in the strictness of its adherence to Jewish tradition as set down in the Torah.