Israeli Supreme Court rules in favor of the Jewish people

For more than 65 years, the Jewish world has been wrestling with the existential question,“Who is a Jew?” Last week, the Jewish world took a major step toward answering that question.

After a nine-year legal battle, Israel’s Supreme Court issued an unprecedented decision recognizing the validity of Orthodox conversions conducted outside the rabbinate in Israel. “The Jewish people is indeed one,” wrote Chief Justice Miriam Naor, “but they are comprised of distinct and diverse shades and sub-communities within them.” This decision has the potential to completely change Israel’s demography for the better, and represents a landmark ruling in the history of religion and state issues in Israel.  More important, it highlights the fact
that Israel is beginning to take responsibility for resolving the question of “Who is a Jew?” once and for all, something that has
implications for more than 5 million American Jews.

The ruling has essentially shattered the monopoly of the Chief Rabbinate, and the unholy alliance between Israel’s interior ministry and the rabbinate, which prevented anyone who converted outside of the rabbinate in Israel from making aliyah. The achievement is best summed up in the words of Justice Neal Hendel: “The creation of a super-centralized system, and the giving of an absolute monopoly to the Chief Rabbinate on issues of conversion — a monopoly whose practical ramifications are the adoption of a stringent approach and the putting of obstacles in front of Jews who wish to immigrate to Israel — stands in opposition to the central purpose of the Law of Return.” In short, Israel’s definition of a Jew is larger than the rabbinate’s.

Allow me to explain: The law in Israel recognizes someone as Jewish in two distinct ways, for civil purposes and for purposes of marriage. At present, there are more than 350,000 people in Israel — mostly immigrants and their children — whose identity is completely Jewish, and who made aliyah as Jews, but who are listed in the population registry as “lacking religion.”  Though these citizens serve in the Israel Defense Forces, celebrate the Jewish holidays and go to Jewish schools, they are unable to legally marry in Israel or receive full benefits as Jews. Basically, the State of Israel recognizes them as Jews, but the centralized rabbinate — which is legally entrusted with all issues related to marriage — doesn’t. 

Imagine that one out of every 14 Jewish soldiers in the IDF isn’t fully recognized as a Jew. Or that 7 percent of children in Jewish schools aren’t Jewish.  This problem is exponentially increased when the issue of those who could potentially make aliyah — i.e., many of America’s Jews — is raised.  My guess is that 5 million Jews in the United States would not be recognized by the rabbinate as Jewish — at least at first blush.

For many years, several organizations, including my own, ITIM, have worked to enable a more fair process of conversion in Israel.  Always in our sights was the moral obligation the Jewish (and rabbinic) world had to more than 350,000 individuals who made aliyah as Jews but who are not halachically Jewish. When I stood on the National Mall in 1987 and screamed, “One, two, three, four, open up the iron door,” I had no idea that more than 25 years later, the battle for one part of the Jewish people to fully rejoin the Jewish people would continue in Israel.   

While we spent significant resources to work with the existing rabbinic establishment, we also were sometimes forced to take an adversarial position. In 2011, our attempts to bolster the existing conversion process in Israel pivoted, following the unfortunate episode of Maxim and Alina Sardikov. Alina had made aliyah in 1993, based on her father’s Jewishness. When she and Maxim joined the IDF, she joined the IDF conversion program and completed it successfully. She was given a conversion certificate signed by the chief rabbi of Israel. But that was insufficient for the chief rabbi in Ashkelon, where Alina lived. He refused to open her marriage file and the Chief Rabbinate refused to force the rabbi to do so.  Following a year of negotiations, ITIM sued the rabbinate in Israel’s supreme court, eventually coming to an arrangement that enabled not only Maxim and Alina to be married through the rabbinate, but also guaranteeing the rights of more than 40,000 other converts.

These efforts bore fruit. In 2014, the Knesset passed legislation that would enable a wider range of rabbis to enact conversions in Israel, thus chipping away at the monopoly that the centralized rabbinate exercised over this critical issue. Unfortunately, a year ago, the government rolled back this legislation, thus reinforcing the monopoly.

All the while, the cases of three converts who had converted “outside the system” in alternative Orthodox rabbinical courts not sanctioned by the state were working their way through the courts. And, in the absence of legislation, the courts ruled last week that the rabbinate doesn’t have a monopoly on who is a Jew.

In its limited context, the court gave legal standing to rabbinical courts that operate outside of the jurisdiction of the rabbinate. To be clear, the court didn’t force the rabbinate to recognize these converts, but rather determined that Israel’s civil authorities must grant Jewish status to them. But in its broader argument, the court stated — for the first time — that the rabbinate cannot as a hegemony control personal status. The court doesn›t say who is a Jew, but it does authorize the local Jewish communities to do so themselves — essentially reshaping the discourse on the future of Judaism.

For those of us in Israel, this has the potential to help resolve the demographic crisis described above. There are already rabbinical courts that operate outside the rabbinate that have now been given legitimacy by the state, and this court decision enables those who seek conversion outside the rabbinate to realize recognition.

But for the international Jewish world, this victory is equally repercussive. For it states clearly that the rabbinate’s monopoly is untenable, and that those seeking a way into the Jewish community have more than one path to choose from.

Rabbi Seth Farber is an Orthodox rabbi and the director of ITIM: The Jewish Advocacy Center in Israel and is a founder of Giyur Kehalacha — the network of alternative conversion courts in Israel.