For a few thousand Jews of uncertain status, Israel is tearing itself apart. The Supreme Court ruled, Monday 1er March, on a petition that had been lying on her table since 2005: she affirms that people who have converted to Judaism in Israel through the Reformed and Conservative movements, that is to say outside the framework imposed by the Chief Rabbinate, must be regarded as Jews by the state. According to the “law of return”, they therefore benefit fully from the right of citizenship in Israel.
It is not their number that makes it possible to gauge the earthquake caused. The state receives barely a few dozen of such requests each year, especially from spouses of Israelis. Reformed Judaism, a modern and liberal current, in Israel boils down to a hundred communities – barely 4% of the population identifies with them. The “law of return” has also long applied to reformed and conservative Jews converted abroad, especially in the United States, where their organizations are in the majority.
But the court ruling touches on the raison d’être of the Jewish state, the unresolved questions of Zionism, the fault lines between the country and the Diaspora. The chief rabbinate, held by the ultra-Orthodox and which has a de facto monopoly on conversions, reacted with fury. For Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau, the Court promises “To provoke on Israel a deluge of new immigrants whose link to Judaism is null”. And to ask: “How is the State of Israel a Jewish state, when any non-Jew can be a citizen? “
Defining Jewishness
The Court would have preferred not to have to answer this question. In her decision, she deeply regretted that Parliament had failed to pronounce itself. For a decade, two commissions have issued very cautious conclusions on the subject, the last in 2018.
“For the ultra-Orthodox, this raises dramatic doubts about the Jewishness of people” Ofer Zalzberg, analyst at the Herbert C. Kelman Institute
They came up against the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox of any exception to the authority of the chief rabbinate over the cycles of Jewish life: marriage, divorce, funerals and conversions. A subject “Crucial, the most important that has been posed to us for generations”, says Dov Halbertal, a progressive rabbi within the ultra-Orthodox community. Without any measure, the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party on Tuesday broadcast an advertisement critical of the court’s decision, presenting the converts as “dogs” wearing the kippah.
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