Asking for forgiveness from the convert

When Yom Kippur opens, more than millions of Jews will inaugurate the holiest day of the year with the biblical phrase" ve-nislach le-chol adat bnei yisrael, ve-lager hagar btocham," Loosely translated, we beseech God to forgive the sins of the entire congregation of Israel, and the converts who dwell among them.  But this year, as my colleague Aliza Lavie recently wrote, the Orthodox Jewish world might think strongly about begging God for forgiveness for what we have done to the convert among us.
 
In the past year, the momentum has shifted. Though the Torah insists on protecting the convert, on making him or her a full member of the community, and on never reminding a convert of his or her past, institutional orthodoxy has condemned converts to a never-ending set of tests and examinations, to assessments and evaluations, and ultimately to a level of scrutiny unprecedented in Jewish history.

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In Israel, the shtetl rules

When Y turned to me to help him get his marriage license, I thought he was kidding. Y's story, which appeared in The Jerusalem Post, is another example of how the shtetl continues to trump the metropolis - at least when it comes to Jewish life in Israel. And it is another example of how I often find myself at odds with an orthodox establishment I'm proud to be part of.

Y is an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who made aliya based on his father's Jewishness. Y feels the Jewish narrative is compelling, and during his four-and-a-half year stint in the IDF, he underwent conversion through the army rabbinical court. I know the rabbinical court judges who served as Y's "bet din" personally, and they are men of impeccable stature and learning.

Two years following his conversion, Y fell in love, with another immigrant from a traditional Jewish family. His fiancé had little difficultly proving her Jewishness to the rabbinate, and the couple were enamored by the treatment they received at the Rishon Lezion marriage bureau. Only following their marriage did the problems begin.

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New conversion bill a recipe for continued chaos

The new "conversion law" - which passed a first reading in the Knesset this past week - is essentially a political tool which will in no way bring order to the chaos that characterizes conversion in Israel. With 310,000 immigrants from the Former Soviet Union eligible for conversion, it is unpalatable that conversion has become a subject of Pyrrhic political victories.

The original law, presented to the Knesset in two variations by Rabbi Michael Melchior and David Rotem, was meant to allow community rabbis to perform conversions. Essentially, this would have allowed for less public scrutiny of conversion judges, and theoretically for those moderate city rabbis to perform conversions and register their converts for marriage. The authors of the bill were clever enough to include a clause that would allow converts the benefit of registering in any region, and not necessarily their own locale. 

The strength of the bill was that it ensured that conversions would be performed under Orthodox auspices, but understood that within Orthodoxy, there are multiple voices, and converts could choose their approach while still falling within the consensus of the halachic community.

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Rethinking 'recognized conversions'

Israel's immigration policy needs some serious rethinking, particularly if critical decisions are left in the hands of clerks.

While the law of return allows Jews - both those born Jewish and those who converted - to immigrate to Israel and receive citizenship automatically, it does not specify the threshold for proving one's Jewishness. While much has been written about this (see for example the NY Times article from last March), there is little question that the State has to rely on recognized Jewish communities abroad for Jewishness certification.  

In recent months, I have encountered a new problem - staggering in its implications. It seems that no one is quite sure how to define the term "recognized Jewish community." I know this sounds like a joke, but it isn't.

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