Conversion conundrum: The fight over symbolism, the neglect of the problem

"I always felt in my heart that I was a Jew.” So said Irena Silber (her last name is changed upon her request), who converted to Judaism just this year but who made aliyah to Israel 30 years ago.

Irena arrived in Israel in 1990 from Russia at the age of 16, along with the rest of her family, having finally escaped the clutches of the repressive Soviet regime, which trampled on Jewish life for over three generations.

But as a result of Communist efforts to extinguish Jewish life, Irena, like many others, was not Jewish according to Jewish law, born to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother.

She says that she was always interested in Judaism, and felt a sense of national belonging to the Jewish people, but that once she was in Israel, the necessity to convert was lacking.

Eventually, she married a man who also arrived from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, although he was halachicly Jewish, and the couple had three children, two daughters and a son, all of whom, according to Jewish law, were not Jewish.

Irena’s story is typical of thousands of immigrants to Israel from the countries of the FSU.

In the 1990s, some one million immigrants came to Israel from the countries of the FSU, approximately 20% of whom were not Jewish according to Jewish law, since they were not born to a Jewish mother.

Ever since, a battle has been waged over conversion. One the one hand have stood those who, fearing a wave of Jewish intermarriage in the Jewish state between these descendants of Jews and their fully Jewish Israeli brethren, have sought to make conversion easier specifically for this group of people.

This campaign has largely been led by religious-Zionist rabbis who saw the aliyah from the USSR as the redemption of a large part of the Jewish people who were cut off from the rest of the nation.

 

On the other side of the divide was the rabbinic leadership of the ultra-Orthodox community, which feared that insincere converts would be allowed to become part of the Jewish people for societal expediency without ever being fully committed to Jewish life and practice.

But at the same time, there is another key element to the conversion conundrum which is intimately bound up with the State of Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and in particular Jewish status as a gateway to citizenship in the Jewish state.

In 1970, the Law of Return was amended to make citizenship available not only to anyone born Jewish around the world but also to those who converted to Judaism, although the amendment did not stipulate what conversions were acceptable.

Ever since, the Reform and Conservative movements have fought an ever-intensifying battle for their conversions to be recognized, initially for the purposes of registration in the Interior Ministry as Jewish, then for citizenship for those who converted with the progressive Jewish movements abroad, and most recently citizenship for those who converted with those denominations in Israel.

These efforts have been heavily resisted both by the religious-Zionist and the ultra-Orthodox religious establishment, in government and in the Chief Rabbinate, creating crises and controversies in Israel, and between the Jewish state and the Diaspora.

Most recently, this issue exploded in March this year when the High Court of Justice ruled that someone who converted with the Reform and Masorti (Conservative) movements in Israel must be afforded citizenship under the Law of Return.

Non-Orthodox converts from abroad were recognized for the purposes of citizenship in 1989, but until now citizenship was not available for those who converted with these denominations in Israel.

The ultra-Orthodox parties United Torah Judaism and Shas denounced the ruling, castigating the court for interfering in religious matters and warning that the Jewish character of the state was under threat.

Both parties even vowed to pass legislation allowing for the Knesset to override the court’s decision, and said they would demand such legislation as a condition for entering a new government.

At the same time, the Reform and Masorti movements celebrated what they described as a monumental step forward for their denominations in gaining recognition by the Jewish state of their conversions and, by extension, the legitimacy of their movements.

RABBI ANDY SACKS is the director of the Masorti Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly in Israel and also secretary of the Masorti Rabbinical Court for Conversion in Israel.

He said that the ruling demonstrated “a recognition on the part of the judges that there is no monopoly or exclusive right of the Chief Rabbinate and their agents in Israeli law over who is a Jew,” and that the progressive Jewish denominations in Israel are indeed recognized communities in the Jewish state.

“It shows that the State of Israel recognizes that Judaism, in Israel or the Diaspora, is not the sole monopoly of a single denomination or theology,” asserted Sacks.

For the Masorti and the Reform movements in Israel, this ruling is critical for their legal standing, but just as importantly for their image in Israeli society.

Having for decades faced discrimination in terms of funding and official status in comparison to the Orthodox establishment, the High Court’s conversion ruling in March comes as a significant boost to the standing of the Reform and Masorti movements as recognized streams within the spectrum of Israeli Judaism.

And, indeed, the non-Orthodox denominations believe that the ruling will enable those movements to make further inroads into the Israeli mainstream.

“There are so many Israelis who have taste for heritage but are put off by the religious establishment,” said Sacks.

“This ruling means people can live their Judaism without turning to an institution which they find disagreeable and often corrupt,” he continued in reference to the Chief Rabbinate, noting that among those who approach the Masorti Rabbinical Court for conversion are people who say they were “humiliated” by the state conversion system, which is under the guidance of the Chief Rabbinate.

THE SYMBOLIC and declarative nature of the High Court ruling is no doubt important and will continue to reverberate for years to come.

But the Reform and Masorti movements do not actually convert large numbers of people. The former performs roughly 250 conversions a year, and the latter just 120.

The State Conversion Authority, which operates under the guidance of the Chief Rabbinate, did some 2,500 conversions in 2018, but that figure is down from close to 4,000 earlier in that decade.

According to the Central Bureau for Statistics, there are around 400,000 Israelis who are defined as “without religious classification,” overwhelmingly citizens from the FSU who are not Jewish according to Jewish law, and the number is growing.

Bearing in mind that the central concern over conversion back in the 1990s was to prevent Jewish intermarriage in the Jewish state, these efforts by the state to combat this phenomenon have been ineffective, to say the least.

Indeed, further data from the Central Bureau of Statistics show that intermarriage rates between Jewish Israelis and the non-Jewish descendants of immigrants from the FSU are increasing.

Every year, thousands of Israelis who, for various reasons, are unable to marry through the Chief Rabbinate fly abroad to marry in civil ceremonies.

In 2011, there were 1,527 couples who married abroad or registered their foreign civil marriage, in which one of the spouses was not Jewish. Seven years later, in 2018, there were 2,460 such couples.

One of the central problems in dealing with this issue is that, increasingly, very few people seem to care, or at least care before they are confronted with the situation.

The ultra-Orthodox community marries exclusively among itself, and its youth have no opportunity to meet other Israelis from diverse backgrounds, much less form relationships with them.

The haredi rabbinic and political leadership does, however, fight fiercely against any efforts or suggestions to tackle the problem, such as empowering municipal chief rabbis to set up their own conversion courts alongside the central system, or encouraging the creative solution of converting minors, more of which later.

Yom Tov Stern is the son of prominent ultra-Orthodox arbiter of Jewish law Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Stern of Bnei Brak, and has been assisting conversion candidates with their conversion process for over ten years. He deals with candidates in both the state conversion system and independent, ultra-Orthodox courts such as that run by his father and the Bnei Brak Rabbinical Court founded by the late Rabbi Nissim Karelitz. 

Stern insisted that the ultra-Orthodox community warmly welcomes all converts.

This is a merit for us,” said Stern. 

The Torah mentions more than 30 times the honor of a convert, it is a very honorable status.”

But he insisted, the conversion process must be done “with all sincerity, and all the truth the matter requires,” adding that a convert must be “someone who really wants to be a convert in the most correct and honest way and not because of external reasons which make it worthwhile for him to be a Jew.”

Added Stern “You really need to be convinced that someone who wants to be a Jew is serious about it, accepts upon himself the yoke of the commandments, to live a Torah life, with everything that entails.”

The secular public is also for the most part not bothered by increasing intermarriage rates, with just 25% saying they would not enter a relationship with someone not Jewish, according to a 2019 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute.

Self-defined “traditional Israelis” seemingly do care about intermarriage, since some two-thirds of this population would not be willing to date a non-Jew, but there is little urgency or activism from this sector on the issue.

What remains is the religious-Zionist community, which expresses high concern about intermarriage, but whose political representatives have placed very little emphasis on tackling the issue, deferring to the ultra-Orthodox parties on the issue of conversion and practically all other religion and state issues as well.

RABBI SETH FARBER is one person who does care. Farber, a religious-Zionist rabbi, is one of the founders of the Giyur K’Halacha network of independent, Orthodox rabbinical courts.

The network has converted around 1,400 people since it began operations in 2015, mostly among immigrants from the FSU or their descendants.

But Giyur K’Halacha has a particular focus which it believes is the best way forward to combat intermarriage in the future: the conversion of minors, girls under the age of 12 and boys under the age of 13.

The advantage in converting minors, with parental consent, is that the process within Jewish law is far simpler than for adults.

Whereas adults must “accept the yoke of the commandments,” often interpreted by rabbinical courts for conversion as meaning that a convert be religiously observant, minors are not obligated to observe Jewish law and therefore can be converted without this difficult step.

Giyur K’Halacha takes a lenient attitude toward halachic opinions that assert that the conversion of minors must be done only if both parents are either also Jewish or convert with the child, but bases its approach on the written opinions of highly respected Orthodox arbiters of Jewish law.

Yom Tov Stern acknowledged that “there is a problem with intermarriage, there’s no doubt it has the potential to increase” but says that solutions are not simple.

Converting minors, he said, is simpler on one hand, but pointed out that someone who converts as a minor can later in life regret and retract their conversion, which could lead to other complications.

Farber asserted that converting the 50,000 minors who are the descendants of immigrants from the FSU would resolve the issue.

And he also demurs from the assertion that no one in the State of Israel particularly cares.

“People care about it when it affects them personally, when a child comes home and tells their parents they’re in love with someone who is halachicly not Jewish,” said Farber.

Such relationships begin in the army, in university, and the myriad other forums of Israeli daily life where young men and women meet and interact.

Those descendants of immigrants from the FSU who are not Jewish according to Jewish law are fully integrated into Israeli society. They have Israeli names, they do not have Eastern European accents, and are present in all walks of life, and for the most part have a strong sense of Jewish and Israeli national identity.

Intermarriage with their peers who happen to be halachicly Jewish is therefore a foregone conclusion.

Giyur K’Halacha’s strategy focuses on converting minors because conversion through the state conversion system is made so difficult, the dropout rate is so high, and demand for conversion among adults is very low.

Which brings us back to Irina. She did not convert alone, but did so together with her 11-year-old daughter, just before her bat mitzvah, and they both converted with Giyur K’Halacha.

What set Irina on this path was actually her eldest daughter, who discovered in high school that she was not halachicly Jewish, and slowly became more interested in living a Jewish life, eventually converting through the IDF’s conversion program.

Her son followed in the footsteps of her daughter and also converted through the army, and all the while the family adopted religious customs and practices in order to accommodate the converting children and their new lifestyle.

When Irina decided that she wanted to join her children, she saw it as only natural and right that she have her youngest child convert as well.

She said that she had friends who started the conversion program with the State Conversion Authority, but they found it to be “hopeless and humiliating,” and so decided she did not want to participate in such an experience.

“I feel that I have closed a circle. I always felt in my heart that I was a Jew, but now I feel even more connected to Jewish life, and I find myself thinking that it is a shame I did not have this experience 30 years ago.”

For Irina, with her entire family now having fully rejoined the Jewish people, the circle has indeed been closed.

But for the Jewish state at large, the conversion conundrum remains very much an open question.