Jerusalem – The all-around moratorium on the legal actions that could change the status quo of conversions in Israel has been extended by another six months, it was revealed on Monday.
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Israel Beiteinu – whose conversion bill caused the hubbub that prompted the moratorium’s first six-month segment in July – as well as Shas agreed to not advance their legislation on the matter until July 10, and the Reform and Masorti (Conservative) movements will hold off with their High Court of Justice petitions demanding a more egalitarian stance toward non-orthodox conversions in Israel.
In the interim, Jewish Agency head Natan Sharansky and Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser, representing Jewish unity and the Israeli government, respectively, will chair a round-table discussion to include representatives of the Interior Ministry, Justice Ministry, non-orthodox streams and the Jewish Agency. That forum will set out to streamline and deal with complaints and concerns about bureaucracy that converts and potential converts could encounter in the Chief Rabbinate or other parts of Israeli administration.
At this stage, the round-table did not include a representative from the Chief Rabbinate, nor of the State Conversion Authority.
It was not clear if the moratorium included Israel Beiteinu’s recently proposed military conversion bill, which is a private bill.
In July, the Prime Minister’s Office had mediated a six-month freeze on their High Court of Justice petition of the Reform movement demanding state recognition of non-Orthodox conversions conducted in Israel. In return, the announcement continued, the government would halt the legislative process on the conversion bill for that period.
The deal was hammered out by Hauser, at the behest of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, “to find any way to preserve the unity of the Jewish people.”
In the interim, Sharansky was to head a team including members of the non-Orthodox movements and of the government, to create the authority that would complete the legislation on the topic.
Israeli politicians have been playing coalition politics with Jewish identity for decades. The issue involves not only the character of the state for its current residents, but for the entire Jewish people.
If Israel chooses to define its entrance criterion as Jewish by Halachic conversion, and Israeli by Halachic lifestyle, that will be a violation of its compact with the Diaspora, creator of the state, a withdrawal from its commitments to its Zionist foundation as refuge for the entire Am Yisrael. But Israel is 60+ years sovereign and is certainly entitled to do so. But consider the cost:
With barely six decades behind what can only be described as Christendom’s effort at a final solution to its millennial and self-created “Jewish Problem,” the West has inevitably turned to a modified, politically correct form of antisemitism, targeting the state of the Jews as pretext. But lest we forget that antisemitism is endemic, in the cultural-historical blood of the entire West, there was also the attack on the US Holocaust museum in Washington, the sharp increase in antisemitism-inspired attacks in New York reported by the NY Post,