Fundamental issues to Jewish nation to be tackled in Knesset winter session - analysis

• Author: JEREMY SHARON
• Published date: 04 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

But it is not just Dolgopyat's sporting achievement that drew interest. There was also his personal background as an immigrant to Israel under the Law of Return who is the son of a Jewish father but not himself Jewish, according to Halacha, since his mother is not Jewish.

There are currently some 400,000 Israeli citizens like Dolgopyat who made aliyah from the former Soviet Union, or are the children of such immigrants, who are integrated into Jewish society in Israel but are not technically Jewish.

cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });

>

Elements of the religious-Zionist community and leadership have long worried that this phenomenon would eventually lead to intermarriage in Israel between Jews and these descendants of Jews, and in 2018, there were indeed more than 2,400 such couples who wed in civil ceremonies outside of Israel.

In the new winter session of the Knesset, Religious Services Minister Matan Kahana, who is himself from the religious-Zionist community, will introduce legislation that will seek to tackle this most sensitive of issues, which has challenged the Jewish state for decades.

Kahana has already begun a public-relations campaign on social media and in the press to advocate this legislation. But he will need all his powers of persuasion and all his reserves of determination and resilience to get such a law passed.

This is because Jewish conversion is one of the most sensitive and combustible personal issues that the State of Israel has to contend with, affecting the fundamental "Who is a Jew?" question and giving rise to competing claims from all the different Jewish denominations and subsectors of society.

The legislation Kahana is advancing will allow municipal chief rabbis to establish their own conversion courts, essentially decentralizing control over conversion from the Chief Rabbinate and significantly curtailing the influence of the chief rabbis over the process.

This would allow liberally inclined municipal chief rabbis to implement policies such as the conversion of minors and to utilize more lenient criteria for conversion in general, which the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) establishment vehemently opposes.

There is little internal opposition to the legislation in the coalition, but the reforms are bitterly opposed by the chief rabbis, the haredi rabbinic leadership and the haredi political parties on the grounds that the conversions...