U.S. Jews Lobby Netanyahu as Rift Looms Over Conversions

The American Jewish community, often regarded by outsiders as a monolith, faces a serious rift of historic proportions. The cause is the reemergence of the “Who is a Jew?” debate in Israel, prompted by the upcoming vote in the Israeli parliament on a bill that would deny legitimacy to all but Orthodox conversions.

On one side are the Orthodox, who represent a minority of Jews in this country and in Israel, yet have a monopoly on state-recognized religious authority there. On the other side are the more liberal Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist branches, which represent about 90% of temple-going American Jews but have few synagogues or schools in Israel.

At issue are not simply the conversions of a few Roman Catholics and Episcopalians to Judaism but also of people who think of themselves as Jews but whose Jewish parentage is in question. Under strict Jewish law, only the children of Jewish mothers are considered Jewish. Others must undergo conversion. More than 100,000 Soviet immigrants to Israel, many of them the children of mixed marriages, are awaiting recognition as Jews. Until then, they cannot marry or be buried as Jews.

The notion of defining “who is a Jew” plucks at strong emotions in a nation populated with many Holocaust survivors who warn darkly that the last regime so obsessed with weeding out Jews from non-Jews was Hitler’s. Under Israel’s “Law of Return,” anyone with Jewish ancestry may be eligible for Jewish citizenship, making these issues legal as well as religious. For American Jews, more than half of whose children marry non-Jews, the subject is intensely personal. For the Orthodox, it is a fundamental issue of upholding Jewish law.

A clearly agitated delegation of eight Reform and Conservative leaders met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a hotel here Saturday night and said they warned that the proposed Conversion Law would make the majority of American Jews “second-class citizens” in their own promised land.

“The threat to the unity of the Jewish people is so great here that the Jews of North America are unwilling to be quiet,” Reform Rabbi Charles Kroloff, of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, said in an impromptu news conference after the meeting.

On their heels, a delegation of seven Orthodox leaders marched into Netanyahu’s hotel room and urged him to stand firm for the Conversion Law to prevent what they called “a terrifying scenario: a hopelessly fractured Jewish nation.”

“The alternative is that Israel should be split into two separate Jewish communities, one that does not recognize the other,” Orthodox Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel of America, said in an interview afterward.

The issue last caused a furor in 1988, and was quickly dropped after Reform and Conservative American Jews jetted to Israel to express outrage to then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. But now that the Israeli government is in the hands of a coalition dependent on support from ultra-Orthodox parties, the legislation has a much better chance of passage.

A spokesman traveling with Netanyahu said Sunday that the prime minister had no comment.