What To Do About Conversion?

The Knesset Absorption Committee held a session Monday morning regarding conversion of the non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The official number of such non-Jews is 270,000, but the number could be as high as 350,00 or 400,000. Of these, about 25,000 of them are young women close to marriageable age; if they do not convert, their children will non-Jewish as well. At any given point, between 6,000 and 9,000 non-Jews serve in the IDF. Non-orthodox conversion will not be accepted by at least 50% of the population, those who are Orthodox and those who are traditional.



Interior Minister Avraham Poraz (Shinui) said that the pace of conversions must be intensified, and that Reform and Conservative conversions that take place in Israel must be recognized just as the Supreme Court recently ruled regarding such conversions that are performed abroad. MK Rabbi Michael Melchior (Labor-Meimad) said that only Orthodox conversions should be accepted religiously, but basically accepted Poraz's position. He said that although 85% of those who reach the Rabbinical Conversion Court are converted in the first court session, and the rest are converted in the next two sessions, "the question is why so few people even reach that stage. We must promote the concept of conversion so that more people will want to convert."



MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) defended the traditional position according to which the interests of religion and state are the same, and said that non-Halakhic (Jewish legal) conversion should not be accepted. "The only reason that the Jewish nation exists today, after 2,000 years of exile and dispersion, and totally different cultures in their various countries, is because there is a common platform. If we destroy this common platform, the Torah of Moses, then we destroy the nation. There are difficulties, as there have always been difficulties, but this does not mean that we can take shortcuts... If there are some people who want to bring in more non-Jews to strengthen a particular party, or so that there should be more Ashkenazim, or to strengthen the Yesha communities, or so that there should be a stronger secular sector - this is the destruction of the Jewish people... I am in favor of being lenient wherever possible - but the basic demand must be that the children and grandchildren of the convert be accepted as Jews by everyone, without labels of which type of conversion they performed." Gafni also said that what interests many of the new immigrants more than conversion is the economic situation, "that the government, in which Minister Poraz is a senior member, has worsened greatly for the typical immigrant." Reform Rabbi Uri Regev said that Gafni spoke in favor of being lenient, but the hareidi press is very opposed to all such leniencies in the area of conversion.