Jerusalem – Amar’s Committee on IDF Conversions Calls for End of Course

Jerusalem – The rabbinic committee appointed by Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar recommended that he terminate the Nativ course held for potential IDF converts, since Reform and Conservative teachers are part of its staff, Israel Radio reported on Tuesday.

“In this [Nativ] course about 10 of the staff of 170 teachers are Reform or Conservative. We perceive this as a severe problem, that casts a heavy shadow on all of the military conversions, and every effort should be made to cancel this course and/or to not have it as a precondition to the IDF process,” the report quoted from a letter the three-man advisory committee wrote.

It was in the middle of January that senior Sephardi adjudicator Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled that the military conversions were kosher, a stance Amar endorsed. Over 4,500 such conversions from past years thus received a stamp of approval, after a tense few months since it was discovered during a High Court of Justice hearing in September that this chief rabbi and his predecessors had inadvertently not been signing the conversion certificates for years.

The presence of non-Orthodox teachers in the Nativ course is no secret, and Amar undoubtedly was aware of it even before his advisory committee noted it. The three rabbis also recommended that the rabbinic judges in the military conversion courts, who they described as “Godfearing men who do their task with loyalty and dedication,” should not decide to convert after only one meeting with a soldier, but should hold at least two.

They also suggested eight months as a minimal time period from when the conversion request is submitted to the actual moment of conversion, and to add a third seminar of two weeks to the process.