Israeli Religious Establishment Threatens Peace Agreement

By Grace Halsell

On a U.S. visit in the summer of 1993, an Israeli rabbi spoke against what he said was lack of religious freedom in Israel, where only one branch of Judaism is recognized. If Israel does not become more open to other denominations, he warned, Jews could turn against Judaism and the Jewish state might cease being "Jewish."

Considering that most Israeli "Jewish" leaders are secular Zionists and a majority of Israel's "Jewish" citizens say they do not believe in God, some might argue that the rabbi's fears already have come to pass. Assuming, however, that Israel is, as it claims, an "authentic" Jewish state, based on the religion of Judaism, and inhabited largely by Jews, who determines who is an "authentic" Jew? The answer is that a select few Israelis, all male and all Orthodox, now hold that power.

Before the creation of Israel, which gave land to Jews but not to non-Jews, the question of "Who is a Jew?" was a pure and simple religious matter. As with a Christian accepting Christianity or a Muslim accepting Islam, proclaiming oneself Jewish meant accepting Judaism as a religious faith.

Today in Israel, however, it is not so simple:

Item 1: Twenty-year-old Lev Pisahov died in the line of duty in the uniform of the Israeli army. However, on the night the young immigrant from Azerbaijan was interred in Israel, religious authorities decided that, although he had said he was Jewish, he could not be buried alongside other Israeli soldiers who had given their lives for the Jewish state. His father was Jewish, they said, but his mother was not. As a result, initially his body was "burk A alone, in a comer, " according to newspaper accounts, far from the bodies of soldiers deemed "authentic" Jews.

Item 2: Olga Haikov, a 42-year-old mother who acquired Israeli citizenship when she and her husband emigrated from the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 1992, was one of two Israeli women killed in an attack on a Jerusalem bus in a hijacking attempt by Palestinians. The night before Haikov was to be interred, an anonymous phone caller to a burial organization claimed that, although her husband was Jewish, the slain woman was not. "Minutes before the funeral," reported the July 7, 1993 Washington Times, "rabbis decided to bury [Haikov] in a section set aside for people whose Jewishness is in doubt. " The report added that an Orthodox rabbi refused to pray over her grave since she could not be classified as an authentic Jew.

Item 3: A U.S. Reform Jew moves to Israel. He falls in love with another Reform Jew. Although they wish to be married in a Reform synagogue, Israeli law will not permit this.

Item 4: An American couple, longstanding Conservative Jews, move to Israel. He dies and his wife wants to have a Conservative rabbi pray over his grave. Israel will not permit this.

Item 5: An American Christian converts to Judaism in a Conservative synagogue, another American converts in a Reform synagogue. If they move to Israel, will either be recognized as "authentic" Jews? It could depend.

Since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, Israel's ultra-Orthodox leaders have increasingly gained power in religious as well as secular matters. Being "the established religion" of Israel, Orthodoxy permits no other interpretation of Judaism than its own.

The rabbi quoted at the beginning of this article, Ehud Bandel, spokesman for Conservative Judaism in Israel, warned that Orthodoxy was growing in strength in Israel, while the Conservative and Reform denominations, with which more than 60 percent of U.S. Jews identify, suffer from a lack of religious freedom.

"What is at stake in Israel is the Jewishness of the Jewish state," said Rabbi Bandel, the first native-born Israeli ordained as a Conservative rabbi. "Unless religious pluralism is recognized and adopted in Israel, we are facing a very dangerous situation and the unity of the Jewish people is threatened ... Orthodox rabbis in Israel maintain a stranglehold on personal and civil matters including marriage, divorce and burial."

U.S. Reform and Conservative Jews give almost total support to Israel, but they turn blind eyes to the monopoly held there by only one stream of Judaism. The Israeli Orthodox hierarchy does not permit a Conservative or Reform rabbi to officiate at life cycle events, nor does Israel recognize Reform or Conservative religious courts for conversions. Israel will not register as Jews people who convert to Judaism in these branches.

"The only place on earth where I am not recognized as a rabbi is the Jewish homeland, the Jewish state, " said Rabbi Bandel, according to the June 17, 1993 Washington Jewish Week. "Christian and Muslim minorities in Israel than Reform and Conservative Jews. Their clergy and ceremonies are recognized .... I, as a Conservative rabbi, can't even say a eulogy at a funeral."

Item 6: An Ethiopian Jewish man immigrates into Israel, meets an Ethiopian Jewish woman there, and they apply for a marriage license. Will they face obstacles, as Jews in the Jewish state?

"Yes, they will face obstacles," said Rabbi Bandel. "The chief rabbinate does not fully recognize them as Jews. They say they have had a lot of intermarriages. " The dark-skinned Falashas, who have considered themselves Jews for centuries, are told they must undergo a ritual bath and a conversion into Orthodoxy. This, added Rabbi Bandel, "is insulting to them."

In any religion, there are members who claim exclusive possession of "the truth." In the U.S., for example, Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell may claim their interpretations of Scripture are the only route to heaven. Since the U.S. has a Constitution that provides for separation of church and state, however, no Christian fundamentalist can claim the legal power to decide who is-or who is not-a Christian. Israel, however, does not have a constitution.

In a book on civil rights in Israel, Living Without a Constitution Daphna Sharfman says Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, opposed early efforts to write a constitution. Instead, in 1947 ' the year before the founding of the state of Israel, Ben-Gurion, a Polish Jew, signed a "status quo" agreement with religious leaders promising that various aspects of Jewish law would be respected in the new nation. It was such early political alliances, the author says, that led to the current dominance of the religious authorities.

When he became prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin made key concessions to win the support of pivotal ultra Orthodox Jewish partners. One such concession was Begin's promise to review the controversial "Who is a Jew?" question.

While Begin promised to supply a new and more definite answer, Israelis already had one definition on the books. A rabbinical law, or halachi, accepted by the Israeli parliament in 1970, defines a Jew as "a person who either was born of a Jewish mother" (this does not, however, define how the mother became Jewish) or one 'who had converted to Judaism."

In 1988, however, Israel's religious leaders proposed to limit the claims to Israeli citizenship by converts to Judaism to those who had been converted by Orthodox rabbis. This stand by Israel's ultra-Orthodox leaders has offended leaders of Reform and Conservative Jewry in the United States.

"If the religious parties' demands become law," said Rabbi Ira S. Youdovin, the executive director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, "thousands of converts, living conscientious Jewish lives, will come to the staggering realization that neither they nor their progeny are Jews in the eyes of the Jewish state."

Beginning in the late 1980s, as Israeli leaders used the U.S. government to pressure Moscow to permit the emigration of those who called themselves Jews, Israel amended its legal definition of "Who is a Jew?"

In addition to those with Jewish mothers and converts to Judaism, the Israelis said they would accept anyone I as Jewish who had at least one Jewish grandparent. Since Communism had not sanctioned the practice of any religion, including Judaism, no one I knew exactly how many Jews lived in the Soviet Union. But Israel's redefinition of "Who is a Jew?" consider ably broadened the number eligible for emigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, where intermarriage had been common.

Soviet citizens wishing to emigrate who could find no birth certificates for grandparents were told by Israeli authorities that they would accept, in lieu of written proof, recollections of certain Jewish holy days or customs. The Nov. 2, 1990 Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli authorities accepted as "proof" of Jewishness such statements as "My mother would bake triangular cookies" or "My grandfather would light oil lights in the winter."

Since 1990, some half a million former Soviet Jews have moved to Israel. Although Israel accepted most of them as Jews, the rabbinate then told those immigrants who were single-about 100,000 persons-that they could not marry in Israel unless they underwent Orthodox conversions. The rabbinate insisted that by such a conversion they would become "authentic" Jews, eligible to marry in an "authentic" Orthodox ceremony.

Many, perhaps most, nominal Christians might be hard pressed to answer, "What does being Christian mean?" Certainly their answers would differ. Adherents of Islam also might find it difficult to answer, "What does being Muslim mean?" Nevertheless, considering the fact that "who is a Jew?" has been invested with such significance in terms of rights and privileges for those who choose to live in Israel, I was surprised at the variety of answers I received from Jewish acquaintances in the U.S. and Israel when I asked, "What does being Jewish mean to you?"

"I can't explain it from a logical aspect, " Reuven, a native of Rochester, NY, who has lived in Israel since its creation, told me. Being Jewish, he added, is an "emotional" reaction or feeling.

"It's our culture," said Aviva, wife of Reuven.

"It's my religion," Marsha, an Israeli, told me.

"It's my nationality," said another.

"It's a race," said Linda Brown, who with her husband, Bobby Brown, emigrated from New York to live in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Linda told me she was a direct descendant of Abraham and that Jews are "one race, one people. "

However, if Linda actually could trace her genealogy for 4,000 years to the time of Abraham, she would discover that Abraham was not a member of a special "Hebrew" race.

As Rabbi Elmer Berger explained to me, "The word Hebrew, coming from the root word, ibhri, or habiru, does not indicate a person of a certain race, but simply means 'one who crosses over,' Abraham was first called a Hebrew-'one who crosses over'-when he crossed over the Jordan River from his original home near Ur of the Chaldees, in present-day southern Iraq, into Palestine."

In talking with Linda and Bobby Brown, I noticed that they used the words Hebrew, Israelite, Judean and the Jewish people interchangeably to suggest an historic continuity.

Historically, said Rabbi Berger, "the peoples called Hebrews, Israelites, Judeans and the Jewish people were different people at different times, with varying ways of life. None of these were ever a 'pure race'-there was always mixing. The earliest of the reputed forebears of present-day Jews intermarried with the Amorites, Canaanites, Midianites, Phoenicians and other Semitic ancestors of the present day Arabs."

Today, as one can see, some Jews are long-headed, others medium headed, still others short-headed.

Many have black hair, while others have red or blond hair. The majority are light-skinned, but there are dark-skinned Jews from India and Ethiopia and African-American Jews. Jews, therefore, are not a separate race, nor are they a separate culture. Americans Linda and Bobby Brown, for example. are from a culture quite different from those of Yemeni or Moroccan Jews.

In Israel, living side by side, are Jews from two distinct cultures: the Sephardi, or Arab, Jews coming from the Middle East and North Africa, and the Ashkenazi Jews from Poland, Germany, France and Russia.

"The European Ashkenazim have retained control of all branches of government, " Eli Elischar of Jerusalem, a leader of Israel's Arab Jews, told me in an interview. He maintains that although 65 percent of Israeli Jews are of Sephardic onigmi, for most of Israel's history they have remained almost invisible politically. An exception, Moroccan-born David Levy, who was foreign minister in the Yitzhak Sharmir government, lost out to Benyamin Netanyahu in the struggle to lead the Likud bloc after Shamir's retirement.

If being Jewish is not a matter of race, culture or nationality, then is it acceptance of Judaism as one's religion? Yes, says American Jewish writer Irving Howe. He qualifies this, however, by adding that Jews have by and large replaced Judaism with a kind of worship of the state of Israel.

"Maybe 85 to 90 percent of Jewish activity in America is directed toward Israel," he explains. He says he hopes the day will come when an American Jew "can no longer define himself as Jewish by just writing a check for Israel, " and instead has to ask himself, "What does Jewish mean to me?"

"The question, 'Who is a Jew is not really the issue," said Rabbi Berger. "It is important mainly because it leads us to another question, 'Who is a Zionist The Zionists have used the issue about Jewishness to build a Zionist state."

Zionism, he explains, is a concept that Jews are a special people and should live apart from those who are not Jews.

A leftist Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor, Dr. Israel Shahak, says that to understand Israeli policies today, one must understand that Zionists have substituted "Jewish ideology for Judaism as it really is." This Jewish ideology includes Talmudic Jewish laws written in this century and endorsed by the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem, composed of rabbis nominated by the State of Israel. Such laws, Dr. Shahak maintains, provided the basis for "the apartheid character of the Israeli regime in the conquered territories," as well as official sanction for a negation of non-Jews by Jews.

"The Zionists have used the issue of Jewishness to build a Zionist state."

"I personally witnessed an ultra-religious Jew refuse to allow his phone to be used on the Sabbath in order to call an ambulance for a non-Jew who happened to have collapsed in his Jerusalem neighborhood," Dr. Shahak explains. Appalled by this insensitivity to human suffering, Shahak, a retired Hebrew University chemistry professor, asked for a meeting with the members of the Rabbinical Court:

"I asked them whether such behavior was consistent with their interpretation of the Jewish religion," Shahak said. "They answered me that the Jew in question behaved correctly, indeed piously, and backed their statement by referring me to a passage in an authoritative compendium of Talmudic laws, written in this century."

Getting no satisfaction from the rabbis, Shahak went to the main Hebrew daily, Ha'aretz. Although the story "caused a media scandal," Shahak says, "the rabbinical authorities did not reverse their ruling stating that a Jew should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile."

The world at large should pay attention to such rabbinical rulings for two reasons, says Shahak. The first is that Israel is increasing its power, "particularly its nuclear power. " The second is that Israel has increasing influence over "the U.S. political establishment." Hence, accurate information about "Jewish ideology"-and especially about its teachings on the treatment of non-Jews by Israel-become not only important in Shahak's view, "but politically vital as well."

In current negotiations dealing with "land for peace," Shahak believes Zionism might agree to some aspects of a so-called "autonomy" for Palestinians. However, he says, "'Jewish ideology' demands that no part of the land of Israel can be recognized as 'belonging' to non-Jews."

Although non-Jews may live there for the moment, "The principle of 'Redemption of the Land' demands that ideally all the land, and not merely 87 percent, will in time be 'redeemed,' that is become owned by Jews." Therefore, as long as Israel remains a "Jewish state, " Shahak concludes, it will not concede "real sovereignty, or even real autonomy, to non-Jews within the Land of Israel."

Grace Halsell, a Washington-based writer, is the author of Journey to Jerusalem and Prophecy and Politics.