Liberal Group to Discuss ‘Who Is a Jew?’ : Reform Rabbis Gather Here

Who is a Jew? Who should be a Jew? How should someone who wants to, become Jewish?

The questions, which are as controversial in the United States as in Israel, will be the subject of vigorous discussion this weekend as members of Reform Judaism meet for a regional convention in Newport Beach.

More than 500 rabbis and lay leaders of the 1.3-million-member Reform movement, the most liberal of Judaism’s three branches, arrived Friday for the 14th biennial convention of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations’ Pacific Southwest Council, which includes California and four other southwestern states.

The UAHC, with which a third of Orange County’s synagogues are affiliated, recently has been involved in a dispute with Israeli rabbis--the subject of an article in the current issue of Time magazine--over the validity of conversions to Reform Judaism.

Yitzhak Peretz, Israel’s interior minister, resigned in early January when that country’s supreme court overturned his decision to stamp the word “Convert” on the identity card of an American woman whose 1982 conversion was supervised by a Reform rabbi in Denver. The woman, Susan Miller, moved to Israel in 1985, and, under that country’s Law of Return, had requested the automatic citizenship granted to all Jews.

But marriages and divorces conducted by Reform rabbis are not recognized by the Israeli government, and Peretz balked. After the court’s reversal and his resignation, he accused Reform Judaism of “leading the nation of Israel to destruction,” the magazine said.

Peretz’s position was rejected Friday by Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the UAHC and a keynote speaker at the Newport Beach convention. He said in an interview that he was most opposed to what he said was a “politicized Orthodox establishment” which has exerted an undue influence on government policy for years.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, executive director of the Assn. of Reform Zionists in America, called the Israeli minister’s resignation “not all that unwelcome” and said the court’s decision in the Miller case was one in “a series of triumphs” in the Reform movement’s battles with “Orthodox extremism” in Israel.

While Israel should remain a Jewish state, Yoffie said he was optimistic that “eventually Israel will move toward a separation of synagogue and state.” What the Reform movement would like to see in Israel, he said, is a state that is “both Jewish and democratic.”

According to ritual law, called halacha in Hebrew, hereditary Jewish identity is matrilineal, or transmitted through the mother. Thus, anyone born to a Jewish mother is automatically considered Jewish; the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not considered Jewish and must undergo conversion.

The same historic standard of law and practice requires those who convert to Judaism to undergo a course of study, then several rituals, including, for women, immersion in a bath called the mikveh and, for men, circumcision.

Patrilineal Descent

Reform Judaism has drawn criticism in this country and in Israel since the UAHC and its rabbinical affiliate, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, decided in 1983 that Judaism is also patrilineal-- that any child of a Jewish father is also automatically Jewish. Earlier, the Reform movement decided that immersion and ritual circumcision for adults were not necessary for conversion.

“For at least a hundred years patrilineal descent has been a de facto policy of the Reform movement,” said Rabbi Henri E. Front of Temple Beth David in Westminster. “We have always recognized a child as a Jew if his parents are rearing him as a Jew. The real problem of patrilineal descent came when we made it de jure in 1983.”

The decision on descent has also put the Reform movement at odds with the Conservative and Orthodox branches of Judaism in the United States, as well as with Israeli rabbis, and one of the panel discussions today will be on the subject of patrilineal descent.

Schindler predicted “without any doubt” that Conservative Judaism would eventually adopt the Reform position on patrilineality, just as it has accepted the principle and practice of equal participation of women in worship pioneered by the Reform movement.

The equally controversial questions--who should be a Jew, and how?--are also a focus of the gathering of leaders of Reform Judaism, which for the past decade or more has made a concerted effort to encourage non-Jewish partners in interfaith marriages to convert. Those who do are called “Jews-by-choice,” rather than converts.

Demographic Reality

Schindler said that he urged the outreach program to non-Jewish partners in interfaith marriages for a number of reasons.

First, he said, was the demographic reality that “one in three Jews choose non-Jews as a life mate.” At the same time, Schindler emphasized that the Reform movement does not encourage interfaith marriages, and in fact he vigorously opposes it, calling it a “scourge.” However, he said that the Reform movement had come to believe that Jews marry outside their faith “not because they want to desert the Jewish community but because they fall in love.”

Second, he said, “Jews-by-choice” are frequently “infinitely more committed” than the Jews by birth they are married to, and thus they “strengthen our faith.”

And finally, Schindler said, outreach is important “because our fundamental mission as Jews is to be conversionary.”

“The whole idea that Jews do not convert is a myth,” said Front. Only with the advent of Roman Christian and later Muslim rule were Jews prohibited from accepting converts.

“Throughout Jewish history we were active missionaries,” Schindler said. “If you really believe something, your impulse is to share it with someone.”

“We do not seek converts,” Front said, “but we welcome them.”