Israeli Parliament OKs Law Bowing to Orthodox Jewry

In a blow to religious pluralism in Israel, parliament Tuesday narrowly approved a bill aimed at preventing Reform and Conservative Jews from playing an active role in everyday religious affairs.

The legislation, which passed by a single vote after a long opposition filibuster, requires members of government-funded local religious councils to pledge fealty to the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate. The Orthodox establishment holds a monopoly over religious life in Israel that the two more liberal streams of Judaism have been trying to break.

The Reform and Conservative movements claim relatively few adherents here but represent the majority of American Jews. They have been waging a years-long battle for official recognition in Israel.

Eligibility to serve on the religious councils--which oversee neighborhood synagogues and ritual baths, among other services--is one aspect of that struggle. The question of which rabbis have the authority to perform Jewish conversions in Israel is another. The unresolved issues have created a widening rift between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

In the latest twist Tuesday, the legislation was adopted under a threat from several small Orthodox parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to block passage of the overdue 1999 budget until parliament approved the new restrictions for religious councils. The bill passed by a vote of 50 to 49, with one abstention.

“It’s a slap in the face for the vast majority of the Jewish people and for Diaspora Jews,” said Rabbi Ehud Bandel, who heads the Conservative movement in Israel.

But in a move that stunned backers of the bill, Bandel said some Reform and Conservative representatives will go through the motions of agreeing to the new requirements. Israel’s Supreme Court recently ordered that the councils be opened to members of the more liberal movements, and several representatives have been appointed.

Tuesday’s action is unlikely to resolve the overall dispute.

“We are not about to abandon the battlefield,” declared Rabbi Uri Regev, a leader of the Reform movement in Israel. “We will be attending these meetings and trying to reform the system. This legislation is an effort, explicitly, to delegitimize Reform and Conservative Jews in Israel.”

Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, a lawmaker from the Orthodox party United Torah Judaism who is also chairman of the parliamentary finance committee, said the bill was intended to ensure that religious councils are run according to Jewish law. Now, he said, he will have to think of another way to keep the councils exclusively Orthodox.

Just hours before the vote, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis ignited an uproar among Reform and Conservative Jews by suggesting that the liberal movements, through intermarriage and assimilation, have done as much damage to the Jewish people as the Nazis did with the Holocaust.

“Our generation saw a third of the Jewish people wiped out in the Holocaust, and today our people’s existence is threatened because a third . . . are in the process of assimilation,” said Chief Sephardic Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron in an interview Monday with Israel Radio. The danger, he said, is “heightened by Reform and Conservative Jews who recognize mixed marriages.”

Bandel charged that the statements deepened existing divisions among Jews.