AFP/Getty Images

Ultra-Orthodox Jew prays at the tomb of the Biblical Sons of Israel leaders known as The Seventy Elders in the West Bank village of Awarta, south of Nablus, January 2007

Who's a Jew?

By Griff Witte
Washington Post, August 30, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Yael converted to Judaism in 1992, and for the next 15 years she lived in Israel, celebrating the major holidays and teaching her children about the Jewish faith.

But when she and her husband sought a divorce last year, the ultra-Orthodox rabbis in charge of the process ruled that Yael did not need a divorce because she had never been married. She had never been married because she had never been Jewish. And because she had never been Jewish, her children were not, either.

Yael, 43, blond, blue-eyed and athletic-looking, is baffled by the ordeal. "My kids grew up Jewish," she said. "They don't know anything else."

Ultra-Orthodox leaders are using their long-standing dominance of Israel's rabbinical court system to tighten restrictions governing who can become Jewish. They see themselves as defending the religious purity of a people who, according to their interpretation of Jewish law, need to live apart from other groups.

Those on the other side believe that Israel needs all the converts it can get. This group includes secular Jews, but it is led by the religious Zionists, who form the core of the settlement movement in the occupied territories and who feel it is their duty to populate the biblical land of Israel.

When Yael appealed to the High Rabbinical Court of Israel, it not only upheld the original decision but also threw into doubt the legality of thousands of other conversions.

"There is a cultural war going on between various segments of Jewish society," said Benjamin Ish-Shalom, chairman of the Joint Institute for Jewish Studies.

Over the past two decades, Israel has admitted hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Many of the immigrants lacked the paperwork to prove their Jewish ancestry.

To Ish-Shalom, facilitating conversion has been good for the converts, good for Judaism and good for the state. "Israel needs people. It needs loyal people," he said.

At the moment, there is rough parity between the Palestinian and Jewish populations in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, according to Eliyahu Ben-Moshe, a demographer and former deputy director of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. Because of a high Arab birth rate, they are expected to establish a clear majority in the coming decades.

Ultra-Orthodox leaders believe that God originally expelled the Jews from the land of Israel because of their lack of religious devotion and that the secular nature of the modern Israeli nation is unacceptable.

"There's something more important than the state of Israel and Zionism," said Moshe Gafni, a member of Israel's parliament who represents the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party.

Yael is a Protestant by birth who grew up in Denmark. She moved to Israel in 1988 to be with her Jewish boyfriend. Because there is no civil marriage in Israel, she needed to convert to marry him here. The process took a year of intense study of Jewish prayers, holidays and traditions.

When Yael appealed to the High Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem, she was subjected to tough questioning, most of it focused on prohibitions relating to sex. "It was all about our private life — our very private life," she said. "It was simply terrible."

Susan Weiss, a lawyer whose Center for Women's Justice is handling Yael's appeal to Israel's Supreme Court, said she is hoping that the case helps to "change the system from its roots."
 

AR  More religious nonsense. The Dane named Yael had it coming. You can't please racists by learning their words. My cheery advice to her: just chill and read Hitchens on how religion poisons everything.