Israel’s Welcome Mat for Immigrants Under Scrutiny

A sacred tenet of the Jewish state is under fire.

Alarmed by statistics showing that more and more immigrants to Israel aren’t Jewish under the strictest interpretation of Jewish religious law, prominent politicians, commentators and others are urging the government to consider, for the first time, tightening the venerated “Law of Return.” That policy automatically grants citizenship to anyone with a Jewish parent, grandparent or spouse.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak forcefully rejects the idea. As long as he is Israel’s leader, Barak told his Cabinet this week, the Law of Return will be “neither amended nor discussed.” Many Israelis back him, saying that any move to restrict the country’s open-arms immigration policy would be inhumane or even anti-Zionist.

But a wrenching national debate on the issue, fueled in part by an ugly anti-immigrant rally held in this central Israeli town recently, already has begun. At its heart are fundamental questions about the nature of the Jewish state, about the fears of some Israelis that its Jewish character is being eroded and about Israel’s ties to Jews worldwide.

“This is about defining what kind of nation it is to which we belong,” said Natan Sharansky, a onetime Soviet dissident who is Barak’s interior minister and leads Israel With Immigration, a political party made up mainly of immigrants. “It is not accidental that this is creating very deep confrontations. People feel they are fighting for something extremely important.”

The debate was triggered by figures recently released by Sharansky’s office. Although the numbers have been gradually growing, the latest figures show that out of nearly 11,000 immigrants who arrived in Israel during the first quarter of this year, mostly from the former Soviet Union, more than half were non-Jews as defined by Jewish religious law, or Halakha. That law, far stricter than the government’s policy, says there are only two categories of Jews: those born to a Jewish mother and those who have converted.

The Law of Return was enacted soon after Israel’s establishment and was intended to ensure free immigration to all Jews. At the time, the late 1940s, Israel was a poor, besieged nation, eager to build up its population. Later, the policy was expanded to include close relatives of Jews, both from a humanitarian desire not to separate families and in a conscious mirroring of the Nazis’ criteria for Jewishness. Those who were Jewish enough to have been persecuted during the Holocaust, the thinking went, should be considered Jewish enough to be granted shelter in Israel.

These days, though, Israel is a relatively prosperous nation with a booming high-tech sector and a peace process that, while still unfinished, means the country faces no immediate threats from its neighbors. Many here who uphold traditional Jewish law fear that their country has become an attractive destination for non-Jews from economically depressed areas, particularly the former Soviet Union, who have no desire to become Jewish and are interested primarily in improving their standard of living.

Other Israelis worry about their country’s ability to remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, given the rising percentage of immigrants and an Israeli Arab population that now makes up about one-sixth of the state’s 6 million citizens.

Overall, Sharansky said, 25% of the nearly 1 million immigrants who have flooded into Israel in the last decade from the former Soviet republics aren’t Jewish under religious law, although most have a spouse, father or grandparent who is.

The statistics set off alarm bells, sounded first--and loudest--by ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, particularly from the Shas Party, who are pushing for new restrictions to the Law of Return for the first time in its nearly 50-year history.

At the same time, Shas activists in Beit Shemesh sparked a public furor with the Nov. 21 rally, at which a prominent local rabbi, David Benizri, accused newcomers from the former Soviet Union of importing “defilement, pornography, prostitution, disease and alcoholism” to Israel. Other speakers demanded that “the Russians,” who represent 15% of the town’s population of 39,000, be forced to leave.

In addition to its religious concerns, Shas has a political interest in restricting the numbers, and voting strength, of the “Russians” who are often its rivals here.

The Beit Shemesh demonstration--called to denounce the operation here of a handful of stores that sell pork, which is forbidden by Jewish law--was the most bitter of several similar protests held in recent months in Israeli cities with large immigrant populations, including Ashdod and Beersheba.

Benizri’s statements were widely condemned by city officials, by Israeli government leaders and by Eli Yishai, the leader of the rabbi’s own party, Shas.

In an interview this week at the small Jewish seminary he heads here, Benizri said his accusations were “perhaps too harsh.” But no one could argue with his words, he went on, because “they were said out of pain” over two issues: the public sale of pork in a Jewish city and the rising rate of what he calls non-Jewish immigration.

“In a few years, 2.3 million of them [non-Jews] will have come to Israel,” he said, “and before you know it, we will be assimilated. Gone!”

But Shas, a powerful religious party founded by Jews of Sephardic, or Middle Eastern, descent, is hardly alone in expressing concern about the unintended results of Israel’s historically liberal immigration policy, which sought to “ingather” the world’s Jews but took in thousands of its Gentiles too.

Many other influential Israelis, including religious and secular, left-wing and right-wing politicians, editorial writers for two major Israeli newspapers and even a handful of immigrants from former Soviet countries, also argue that it is time to reexamine the law upon which the Jewish state was built.

“One doesn’t have to be a Shas supporter to call for a new appraisal of the Law of Return,” the liberal Haaretz newspaper said in an editorial Tuesday. “The application of a rational, measured immigration policy is one of the benchmarks of a growing democracy.”

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, agreed with that sentiment in a recent conversation with foreign journalists, saying: “The time has come to sit seriously and with dignity to discuss the Law of Return [to see if] we cannot make some changes. Does this [large immigration of non-Jews] fit in a Jewish state? For all the Zionists from generations ago, was this their wish and desire and expectation?

“Democracies, there are 150,” Lau continued. “A Jewish state, there is only one.”

Unlike Barak and other opponents, Sharansky, the immigrants’ most prominent leader, says he is open to discussing possible amendments to the law. But such changes will be extremely difficult, he said. The recent mixed immigration here reflects trends of intermarriage and assimilation evident throughout the Jewish world.

Here in Beit Shemesh, about midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Barak is expected to participate Sunday in a dialogue with representatives of Shas and the immigrant community that organizers hope will ease the tensions.

But employees of one of Beit Shemesh’s non-kosher delis said the wounds from Benizri’s words and other recent slurs will take time to heal.

“They say Russians aren’t good Jews and that every Russian woman is a prostitute,” said Leon Kuhn, 40, who arrived from Moscow in 1994. “We try not to listen to these things.”

Kuhn helped customers find Russian cookies, candies and pork sausages in the store, which was bustling long after dark, then pointed to a fellow worker. “Her husband is Jewish, and she isn’t. So what can you do about it? She loves him, and he’s here. You can’t separate them.”

In his case, he said, both his parents survived Jewish ghettos.

“In Russia, everyone called me Jewish,” he said, shrugging. “But now that I’m in Israel, people say I’m Russian. It’s painful.”