COLUMN ONE : Kosher: For Some, It Has Bitter Taste : A belly dancer rekindles a secular-religious debate in Israel that has raged since King David’s day.

Ilana Raskin, a belly dancer from Philadelphia, had carved out a place for herself on the Israeli bar mitzvah and wedding circuit. Her act was a favorite among Israelis from North Africa and the Near East, where festive occasions are not complete without Oriental dance.

But then Raskin began to notice that job opportunities were drying up. Other belly dancers also complained of hard times.

The reason: Rabbis who are legally authorized to certify that food prepared at restaurants and banquet halls is kosher were withdrawing certificates from places where there was belly dancing. The dancing, they contended, was obscene, and violated the spirit of kosher rules.

Raskin went to court in 1988 to limit the rabbis’ power. She argued that a kosher certificate is meant to ensure conformity with Jewish dietary laws, not to censor entertainment. The court agreed.

Raskin’s victory set off a passionate debate over the reach of religious authority in Israel. The issue is at the heart of a continuing dispute over the character of Israeli society and democracy. Where does the rule of rabbis end and secular power begin?

“I was just a stage in the effort of rabbis to control everything,” said Raskin, who gives her age as “thirty-something.” “They wanted to go further and control mixed dancing and the style of women’s dress. Where would it stop?”

Israel views itself as a Western-style democracy, but unlike most societies in the West, Israel has yet to settle on the primacy of man-made law over divine authority. The country is young, but in Judaism the issue is ancient. Secular and religious rule have intermingled uneasily since the days of King David.

The country now appears to be on the verge of a renewed offensive of piety led by religious political parties that hold the balance of power in Israel’s rightist-led government.

In recent negotiations on forming a coalition, these parties won a pledge from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to ban the processing and marketing of pork, a meat forbidden by Jewish law but not by temporal statute, and to curtail public transportation and entertainment, notably soccer games and movies, on the Jewish Sabbath.

“Unfortunately, the laws of Moses and the prophets are not recognized as the laws of Israel, even though our charter is the Bible,” lamented Rabbi Shlomo Goren, a former chief rabbi of Israel and an ardent campaigner for the pre-eminence of Jewish law. “In this super-democracy, it is not clear what is freedom and what is anarchy.”

Just how the public at large would react to wider religious bans is not clear. In a recent mass effort to reform Israel’s electoral system, anti-religious sentiment lay behind some proposals to reduce the influence of minor parties.

In part, these feelings took shape because the two main parties, Likud and Labor, offered to shower religious schools and housing programs with large sums of government money in return for support.

The public became aware that critical public decisions appeared to hang on the eating habits of the contenders. Rabbinical kingmakers first blasted Labor followers for eating pork and rabbit meat, and then Likud leaders Shamir and Ariel Sharon, his new minister of housing, for secretly enjoying shellfish and pork.

The religious parties are prepared to flex their muscles. The proposed ban on pork, perhaps the most unkosher of foods, is already before the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. It is expected to be heatedly opposed on civil rights grounds. Pork is eaten by a large minority of Israelis as a kind of tasty forbidden fruit.

Sometimes restaurant customers order it by asking for “the other thing” or “white meat.” Pork partisans contend that eating pork does not make one any less Jewish. Tel Aviv is an especially large hotbed of pork eating. Its Chinese restaurants offer Szechuan pork and shrimp wrapped in bacon. In Jerusalem, pork is a rarer commodity, although a couple of non-kosher butcher shops do a brisk business.

Ilan Haran, a member of Kibbutz Mizraa in north-central Israel, insists that the rabbis are trying to impose a step-by-step rigidity on Israeli life.

“I believe,” he said, “that the very religious parties want to convert all the Jews to be as Orthodox as they are, so they start with what they think is the most anti-Jewish symbol, pork, the pig. We must stop them now.”

Kibbutz Mizraa is the site of a well-known packing house that produces a variety of pork products, including sausages. About 80% of its products are sold in Israel, Haran said, and among its export customers is the U.S. 6th Fleet. Until the 1960s, when Jews were banned from raising pigs, farmers at Mizraa raised their own. Now they get pork from Arab Christian farmers. About 70,000 pigs are slaughtered annually in Israel.

Haran, 46, who came to Israel from Czechoslovakia as a boy, said: “I believe that there are much more important ways to show you are Jewish than not eating pork: loyalty to country, the following of Jewish ethics. We are the real Jews, not them.”

The mere mention of Mizraa makes rabbis glower.

“These are defiled men,” Rabbi Goren said. “You cannot be a Jew and deal in pork. For money, they sell pork and defile Jews!”

Goren denied that the banning of pork was an issue of religious intolerance. He pointed out that pork is a special irritant to the Jewish people.

When in ancient times Greeks conquered and ruled Jerusalem, they infuriated the local populace by sacrificing a pig on the altar of the temple. Marrano, the name for Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain at the time of the Inquisition, was a word that meant swine. A Jewish participant in the American Revolutionary War was given pork to eat as a punishment by British captors. He refused, and died of hunger.

Goren went on to say that Christian citizens of Israel who like pork should be able to import it under the new law, but no pigs would be raised or otherwise handled in Israel. Goren has received indirect support from Muslim fundamentalists, who have quietly prevailed on Arab butchers to stop selling pork in the Old City of Jerusalem.

There is a knotty legal twist in the rabbis’ position. On one hand, it relies on secular authorities to enforce religious bans, but on the other it rejects secular power to protect citizens who refuse to conform to religious law.

It was a 1983 government act that granted chief rabbis in each Israeli town and city the authority to issue kosher certificates. The move was made in order to make uniform the inspection of kitchens that prepare food according to Jewish law.

In the case of the belly dancer, the court took the stand that the government had granted the rabbis only narrow authority--over food. The extension of kosher rules to other practices at public establishments was illegal, the court decided.

Civil rights lawyers say the verdict opens the way not only for belly dancing in kosher restaurants but also for the celebration of secular New Year’s parties apart from the Jewish New Year and other non-Jewish holidays--the display of Christmas trees, for example--and meetings of non-Orthodox Jewish groups that might be rivals to Orthodoxy.

The Jerusalem rabbinate, which was the defendant in the belly-dancing case, refused to accept the limitations on their rulings and will add a caveat to their kosher certificates saying that if activities such as belly-dancing take place, the establishment is not really kosher.

“Eating kosher food is meant to purify the body,” Rabbi Goren said. “How can it still be kosher if it is served in a place where the soul is defiled? No one can change the religion. No one will accept that the courts can say what is kosher and what is not.”

The court decision, he said, could make the rabbis accomplices in all sorts of hanky panky. For instance, on New Year’s eve, 1988, a hotel in Tiberias put on festivities that included a show in which a couple engaged in erotic acts while hovering outside the hotel in a helicopter. The chief rabbinate of Tiberias withdrew the kosher certificate from the hotel.

Ilana Raskin denies that her dancing is obscene.

“The rabbis claim the only purpose of the shows is sexual arousement of the audience,” she said. “We argued that it is a tradition in the Oriental community. People who are traditional and want kosher food also want belly dancing.”

Raskin, who describes herself as a secular Jew, said fellow dancers have called to congratulate her for saving their livelihoods.

“Our costumes are not modest, but nor are they overly erotic,” she said. “It is an accepted custom for many Israelis who don’t think they are any less Jewish for enjoying dancing.”

The issue was kept alive last week when 10 Israeli belly dancers demonstrated, fully clothed, outside the headquarters of local religious leaders in the southern port of Ashdod.

And there may soon be a new religious battleground here--the soccer field.

Soccer is an immensely popular sport in Israel. Most games are played on Saturday afternoon, and strict religious leaders say that the game defiles the Sabbath. Recently, a group of religious soccer players lobbied for the games to be scheduled on some other day, but club owners said that Saturday is the only fully free day for workers and that it is up to the fans, not the players, to lobby for such a change if they want it.

BACKGROUND

According to the Bible, animals permitted for Jewish consumption--in other words, kosher--must have cloven hoofs and chew the cud. Forbidden fowl are listed, and fish must have both fins and scales. Moses Maimonides, a 12th-Century rabbi, physician and philosopher who was born in Spain and is considered one of the greatest Jewish scholars, saw the dietary laws as being based on both considerations of safe and healthy diet and the avoidance of some ancient idolatrous practices.