Beyond Politics : For Some in U.S., Israel’s Debate Over ‘Who Is a Jew’ Is a Very Personal Issue

Betty and Jerry Gerard, both survivors of Nazi concentration camps, long ago made their peace with the Holocaust and the wrenching emotions that memories of it would stir.

But recent events across the world, in Israel, have revived a kind of anger and anguish the Gerards say they haven’t felt in many years. At issue is the emotionally charged question: “Who is a Jew?”

Betty Gerard, who spent five years in a concentration camp in Holland, recalls another government which concerned itself with that question: Hitler’s Nazi Germany. So it came as a slap in the face to her and many others when Orthodox political parties in Israel proposed a law that many feel focuses attention again on the question of selectivity--this time by narrowing the definition to exclude those who converted to the Jewish faith in the Reform or Conservative branches of Judaism.

Orthodox View

The proposed change is to Israel’s Law of Return, a statute in force since 1950 that guarantees automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew who wishes to live there. The modification would specify that, among converts to the Jewish faith, citizenship status would be bestowed only if the conversion was performed by an Orthodox rabbi. Moreover, because Jewish lineage is matrilineal, a person whose mother converted by a Reform or Conservative rabbi also would be ineligible.

The formation this week of a new coalition Israeli government that does not include the Orthodox parties considerably weakened the chances that such a proposal will pass in the Knesset.

And American Jewish leaders estimate that the amendment, if passed, would directly affect a few dozen immigrants a year at most.

So why the fuss? “The problem is,” said George T. Caplan, president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, “it threatens the centrality of the concept of the Jewish homeland in many Jews’ minds. Their perception is if a member of their family who happens to be the child of a Conservative or Reform convert goes to Israel, they will not be accepted by the state . . . and in effect, what they considered all of their lives as a potential homeland is no longer that.”

For many, there is a deeper irony.

A Question of Selection

“There is a very deep-seated feeling that 40 years after the Holocaust, Jews should not be making a selection among themselves,” said Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, Hillel director at UCLA, whose background is Orthodox. “As I heard one survivor put it, would Hitler have concluded that a Jew converted by a Reform rabbi is not a Jew?”

Betty and Jerry Gerard, Rita Lowenthal and Carolyn Kipper are four Los Angeles residents who would answer “No.”

Married for 17 years, the Gerards share a comfortable Sherman Oaks house crammed with books and memorabilia. On a coffee table, for instance, sits the last concrete link Jerry Gerard has to his family’s past, a silver chalice that belonged to his grandfather.

On a living room wall is a print of Betty Gerard’s synagogue in Dortmund, Germany--the one she remembers was burning on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, Nov. 9, 1938, when the Holocaust began and she went into hiding.

She was 4 years old. Her parents, who owned a shoe store in the predominantly Catholic town, took her to the convent, still dressed in her pajamas, where nuns who knew her family agreed to help her escape. The next year and a half was spent making futile runs to the Dutch border. When she was barely 6, the nuns turned her over to an organization for Jewish orphans, which placed her in a children’s home in Holland. She was there but a few months before the Germans invaded. She ended up in camp Westerbork, where she became a “camp rat,” one of a group of children who used the sewers to run messages between prisoners.

What helped her survive, she said, was that she was so young when she was sent to the camp that “I thought the whole world lived this way.”

Now, she wonders, “What did I survive for? To now see a bunch of Orthodox Jews decide that I’m not a Jew? Where the hell was I?

“I’ve seen too many people killed for just being Jewish.”

Betty Gerard was liberated from Westerbork in 1945. Jerry, who was kept in 15 different camps during the war, including Auschwitz and Dachau, was freed the same year. Both emigrated to Los Angeles with their families within a few years after the war was over but did not meet until 1971, after she was widowed and he had divorced.

Both have Orthodox backgrounds and belong to a Conservative temple in Encino. They drive cars on the Sabbath and eat what they please, kosher or not. One of their four children married a non-Jew who has not converted. They accept intermarriage, Jerry said, as a fact of life for Jews in America.

“I understand the (Orthodox) fear is that unless you observe the original Mosaic laws, which extend to the way you eat, marry and the way you do everything, Judaism will vanish. But it has not happened,” he said. “(Judaism) is richer by way of having accepted the life styles of the countries Jews are living in. . . . By going back to the archaic ways of being a Jew, it’s like saying, ‘OK, go back into the cave.’ ”

He said that if the Orthodox element in Israel were successful in their effort to change the Law of Return, it would not alter his vigorous support of Israel. But Betty was less sure that her ardor would not be diminished.

“I am so up in arms about this,” she said.

Although for a brief period after the war she lived by Halacha, the Orthodox laws, she says today she particularly could not tolerate the “second-class status” it accords to women. The laws specify, for instance, that 10 men form a minyan, the quorum needed to recite certain prayers.

“But you could have 100 women and not have a minyan,” Betty said, incensed. “In the free world, women have earned the right to be on our own.”

Rita Lowenthal, 60, remembers how helpless American Jews felt during the Holocaust.

“There was nothing you could do,” said Lowenthal, a Reform Jew who is a lecturer and social worker at Hebrew Union College.

So after the war ended “and the news hit about what happened in those years,” she recalled, American Jews began to mobilize. Some turned their energies into building Jewish political and charitable organizations. In 1950, Lowenthal, then about 22 and a schoolteacher in Pittsburgh, went to Israel.

Stayed Four Months

“To be there was a kind of young adventure,” Lowenthal said, sipping black coffee in the kitchen of her cozy house in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica. “You had this feeling that everything you did made a difference, that if you planted a tree (in Israel), it was not like planting a tree in Santa Monica. It was going to do all these wonderful things. It was going to hold back the earth so you could reclaim the land. Everything you did was dramatic.”

She went for a visit but stayed four months living on a kibbutz. Food was scarce (“I remember they said six olives equals the protein of one egg, so eat six olives”), and housing was chiefly in tents. But Jewish immigrants were flooding in, and Lowenthal was “totally excited and fascinated” to be a part of history-in-the-making.

The creation of the new country was, in her mind, the only thing that “kind of tidied up things a bit” after the war, “a metaphor for hope after all the destruction.” It was during those months that she forged a “psychological bond” with Israel, she said.

When she returned home, she quit teaching, got involved in fund-raising for the Jewish community, and married a strong Zionist who was helping refugees immigrate to Israel. (They eventually were divorced.) She later went back to school for a master’s degree in social work and now directs a college program for people who want to work for Jewish organizations.

A frequent visitor to Israel, she says she fantasizes about living there permanently.

“A lot of Jews live with that (dream),” she said. “It’s sort of the escape hatch. Not from this country. But, it’s like an escape hatch from life, when things go really rotten.”

So it is “unthinkable,” she said, that certain elements in Israel would consider tampering with the Law of Return, so central to the concept of Israel as a safe haven for Jews of any stripe.

“The Law of Return was this incredible statement, that Jews--not defined by the state of Israel but anyone who felt themselves Jewish--would have a place to go to. That is not to be toyed with. It is not that I feel insecure in this country. I simply don’t. But you can’t not look at history. There is always some place in the world that Jews feel insecure. If they have to go in a hurry, or if their children have to go, without having done the prescribed things, Israel is a place where they can be. That’s one of the things that country was built around. To have it defined so narrowly is frightening.”

So when she spent 10 days in Israel recently for a conference of Jewish feminists from around the world, she picketed twice outside the Jerusalem home of Israeli President Chaim Herzog--once with a

group of “progressive Israelis” and again with fellow feminists.

She carried a sign that said “Who is a Jewess?”

“I am busy being Jewish almost every day of my life on some level,” she said. “For someone else to define that is very insulting.”

When Carolyn Kipper, 36, was undergoing conversion to Judaism, a friend warned her that because it was being done under the guidance of a Reform rabbi, it might not be recognized in Orthodox Israel.

“My reaction then was this isn’t really important, whether there are people in Israel who won’t accept me as a Jew,” she said.

She feels the same way today.

“I think it is very sad, it’s shortsighted, closed-minded” to specify, as the Orthodox parties in Israel are attempting to do, who is a Jew and who is not.

On a recent afternoon, Kipper’s 2-year-old daughter, Natalie, was playing with the Hanukkah candles on the coffee table of their Studio City home while 1-year-old Elliott napped. Four menorahs--one with candleholders shaped like teddy bears--graced the mantle.

Although she and her husband, Robert, do not strictly adhere to Jewish laws--she says that with two small children, it is hard, for instance, to make Saturday a day of rest--Kipper says her sense of herself as a Jew is unshakeable, even though the path to feeling authentically Jewish has been difficult.

A descendant of the Montez family that helped settle parts of what are now Hollywood and Silver Lake, Kipper was baptized a Catholic but attended Protestant churches growing up.

She converted to Judaism nine years ago, before marrying her husband, who is a Jew by birth.

Converting to Judaism “was something I did because I was getting married to someone who was Jewish,” said Kipper, a Harvard-educated pediatrician who sold her practice to stay home with her children. “But after doing it, I really felt I would have done this sooner or later anyway. It seemed to me it (Judaism) was a religion that was really between the observer and God,” and that was deeply appealing.

There were cultural adjustments to make. The most difficult times, however, came after the conversion, when she “went out there in the world of Jews” and found less-than-universal acceptance from those born into the faith.

“People would say things, kind of backhanded things, like ‘Well, she’s a Jew, so she understands,’ but you think maybe I’m not really a Jew. There were times when people would be discussing something Jewish and I’d say what I thought and the answer would be that it doesn’t really matter what you think. It really did hurt. But I converted. I am a Jew.

“What I am is between me and God,” she said quietly. The Orthodox effort to redefine who is a Jew “doesn’t change how I feel about myself, my family or what I’ve done.

“Maybe I’m naive. But if push really came to shove, I can’t imagine they (Orthodox Jews) wouldn’t accept me. I just can’t imagine that.”

Orthodox leaders say the focus on non-Orthodox conversions not only is justifiable but vital to the survival of the Jewish faith.

Assimilation has resulted in an estimated 35% of American Jews marrying non-Jews. According to Lydia Kukoff, the national director of the Reform Jewish Outreach program for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, between 10,000 and 15,000 conversions occur each year in North America, the majority under the less stringent auspices of the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism.

According to Rabbi Chaim Schnur, a Los Angeles-based representative of the Agudath Israel, one of the ultra-conservative parties that is promoting the change in the Law of Return, American Jews who so vigorously oppose the “Who is a Jew” amendment fail to understand “the deeper issue involved.”

“It is painful and it is heartbreaking, but we essentially see the non-Orthodox community as accepting lower standards of conversion in order to cover up its inability to stem the tide of intermarriage and assimilation,” he said.

“I am the child of (Holocaust) survivors and grew up with this consciousness uppermost in my mind,” Schnur said. “But I don’t think we can take . . . Hitler’s sick predilections and say that defines for all eternity who is a Jew,” he said, referring to the Nazi dictator’s definition that a person was Jewish if he or she had one drop of Jewish blood. “Hitler made his laws, but they are not our laws. Judaism is a religion, and it has a right to set the rules of who is to be admitted to the fraternity and who is not.”