One day last fall, a young Israeli woman named Sharon went with her fiancé to the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to register to marry. They are not religious, but there is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews. The last thing Sharon expected to be told that morning was that she would have to prove ”” before a rabbinic court, no less ”” that she was Jewish. It made as much sense as someone doubting she was Sharon, telling her that the name written in her blue government-issue ID card was irrelevant, asking her to prove that she was she.
Sharon is a small woman in her late 30s with shoulder-length brown hair. For privacy’s sake, she prefers to be identified by only her first name. She grew up on a kibbutz when kids were still raised in communal children’s houses. She has two brothers who served in Israeli combat units. She loved the green and quiet of the kibbutz but was bored, and after her own military service she moved to the big city, which is the standard kibbutz story. Now she is a Tel Aviv professional with a master’s degree, a job with a major H.M.O. and a partner ”” when this story starts, a fiancé ”” who is “in computers.”
This stereotypical biography did not help her any more at the rabbinate than the line on her birth certificate listing her nationality as Jewish. Proving you are Jewish to Israel’s state rabbinate can be difficult, it turns out, especially if you came to Israel from the United States ”” or, as in Sharon’s case, if your mother did.
The only acceptable proof should be evidence that one belongs to that religion called Judaism. Beyond that, maintaining one is a jew is meaningless. Can I prove that I am a Christian. Sure. I hve my baptismal certificate. This doesn’t mean that I am a GOOD Christian or a church goer or the like. Baptism marks me permanently. Larry
Re #1: If you read the article, you will see that it is [b]not[/b] meaningless. Israel has no secular marriage, so if you cannot prove that you are a member of a particular religious community you cannot legally marry. Israeli immigration law makes it almost impossible to become a citizen unless you were born inside the country or can prove you are a Jew. Only a minority of Israelis are religiously observant, so that cannot be the criterion.
“Jew” is defined by the religious courts (and to a large extent by the state) as someone who can prove to an Ultra-Orthodox religious judge either that his mother was a Jew or that he was converted to Judaism by an Orthodox rabbi acceptable to the Israeli Ultra-Orthodox (the acceptable list includes no Reform or Conservative rabbis and not all American Orthodox rabbis). The definition is recursive; you can only prove your mother was a Jew by proving that her mother (and your grandmother’s mother, etc.) were Jews or acceptably converted. It does no good to prove that your father was a Jew or that you have personally followed Jewish tradition your entire life.
Would Israel recognize foreign (e.g., Cypriot or Greek) civil marriages between Israeli Jews?
The article as a whole presents a rather sound case for secular government.
As a(n amateur) genealogist, I found this account to be familiar and, frankly, almost thrilling. People go through this type of thing every day, although obviously proving that an ancestor came over on the Mayflower is not of the significance as this lady’s search.
This article gave me a headache and I am not sure I followed all of it. It also reminded me of God’s grace in sending Jesus Christ, to make this all irrelevant to salvation!
Of course the unspoken irony in the strict matrilineal approach is that many Russian Jews had uninvited Cossack fathers. But better that adoptive approach than the norm in Asia where (e.g.) American-Korean kids are condemned to slums and orphanages.
The political system of the State of Israel is as complex as the Talmud. It is basically a proportional representation system where one votes for a party list and the proportion of the total votes given to each party and one’s position on the party list determines who gets to serve. The even division between left and right results in small religious parties having extraordinary power in coalition governments. The British and American constituency plurality system has its problems but it is more stable than any system of proportional representation.
It seems odd that she was Jewish enough to serve in the armed forces but is not Jewish enough to marry. Surely the government researched her mother’s Jewishness when she immigrated? I thought they did that. Or, perhaps the government was satisfied with her mother’s Jewishness, but the rabbis aren’t.
And how is a mother’s jewishness – or anyone else’s – determined if not through connection with judaism? Shall I believe that jewishness is racial, ethnic, geographic, cultural, or it-is-if-I-say-so? None of these make sense since they all vary radically with no common core, if the core is not a particular religion. LM
No, Larry, Jewish law is that you are automatically Jewish if your mother was Jewish at the time of your birth. If she wasn’t, you have to convert, even if your father was Jewish. Whether the mother was religiously observant has nothing to do with the Jewish law. For small children born to a Jewish father and a gentile mother, the father can take the child to a rabbi and have the child converted through prayer and a ritual washing — essentially, a baptism. They will do this if the couple have committed to raising the child Jewish.
As someone with an Israeli husband, I am reasonably conversant with Israeli law.
There are two separate issues here. The first issue is — who is entitled to automatic Israeli citizenship? The bar is fairly low on this. Anyone whose father OR mother was Jewish can become an Israeli citizen. The rationale is that Israel is a sanctuary for people persecuted by anti-semites and anti-semites don’t necessarily have the same definition of “Jewishness” as the rabbincal courts. However, with the fall of the Soviet Union there has been a huge wave of immigrants who are either half-Jewish on the father’s side or not Jewish at all and merely faked up papers to get into Israel. The Israeli rabbis do not consider any of these people do be Jewish.
Israel does not have civil marriage, although they recognize civil marriages performed outside the country, which is why there is a cottage industry in Cyprus and nearby countries in marrying Israelis who can’t marry in Israel. To be married in Israel you must be married by a religious authority — Jewish, Christian, or Islamic. However, the Christian clergy are forbidden, on pain of expulsion, to marry a Christian and Jew together, and the rabbis won’t do it. Hence, such a couple cannot marry in Israel. Neither will the rabbis marry any couple in which both parties cannot prove that they are Jewish in accordance with RELIGIOUS, not state standards. As a result there are hundreds of thousands of Russians and others in Israel who cannot marry in Israel. They are “Jewish” enough to be drafted into the army (that’s a State decision) but if they are killed in the service, they can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetary (that’s a rabbinical decision). This is not merely a technical problem that can be solved with a little trip to Cyprus. These people have second-class status in Israel (better than the Arabs but worse than the “real” Jews) and generally have trouble finding “real” Jewish marriage partners since their children would also be considered non-Jews by the rabbis.
All of this is well-known, but the new problem this particular article addresses is that the rabbis who are basically now running Israel don’t trust any of the Reform or Conservative rabbis in the U.S. since such rabbis a) have no standing in Israel 2) perform conversions that are not acceptable to the Orthodox 3) will certify as “Jewish” people that the Orthodox do not consider to be Jewish. Therefore, if an American immigrates to Israel and then wants to get married in Israel, they may very well find that no rabbi will marry them because they can’t produce a letter from an (Orthodox) rabbi back home testifying to the fact that they are known in the Orthodox community to be Jewish.
On top of this — if you come from a secular home in the U.S. that hasn’t had much connection with ANY kind of rabbi for a few generations, you have zip evidence that you’re Jewish at all except, as in this article, to produce birth certificates going back to some grandmother or great-grandmother along with a photo of said grandmother’s headstone in a Jewish cemetary with Hebrew writing on the headstone. [Actually, my first thought upon reading this is that a nice little business could be set up photoshopping this kind of thing, but perhaps the rabbis will figure this out and stop accepting photographs.]
Thanks, Catholic Mom. This explains it. I knew people could convert, but the conversion has to be performed by an Orthodox rabbi. So, the couple in the article could go to Cyprus to marry, but there would continue to be certain problems. Interesting.
In this sense, Israel mirrors the surrounding countries, where the separate religions have separate civil law. It’s inflexible and creates problems. This is why the UK should not go this route.
Actually, if the problem was on the husband’s side (that is, it was the would-be groom who couldn’t prove his Jewishness) but the would-be bride was solid, then a marriage in Cyprus would be OK, because the kids would still be Jewish.
But if (as in this article) it was the bride’s problem, then the resulting kids would have no way to prove their Jewishness since the Jewishness of their mom had not been satisfactorily established. So basically the kids would inherit their mother’s problem. In fact, the assumption would be that their mother WASN’T Jewish, or else why would she have left Israel to marry?
Since an Orthodox rabbi will only marry a Jew to a Jew, presentation of your mom’s Ketubah (Orthodox marriage certificate) is accepted as proof that you are Jewish. If your mom doesn’t have an Orthodox Ketubah (she married a non-Jew, she married in a civil ceremony outside of Israel, she was married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi) you might still be a Jew, but you are SOL proof-wise.
To be fair to the Jews, they aren’t the only folks who engage in fairly tortuous manipulation of traditional rules in an attempt to respond to conditions that the original rules never contemplated. See, for example, Sheila Kennedy’s [i]Shattered Faith[/i] (New York: Random House, 1997). Over her strenuous objections, the Roman Catholic Church told Kennedy that her twelve-year marriage (with a prior seven-year courtship, premarital clergy counseling, a high-profile Catholic wedding, and the subsequent birth of twins) [i]never happened.[/i] Her husband’s need for an annulment in order to remarry was considered a higher pastoral priority than her need to affirm that she had not just been living in sin with somebody for over a decade. One could also cite some of the similarly obscure reasoning behind some decisions made by Episcopalians.
Larry, the core for Jews, and what makes Jews “Jewish,” is that they are descendants of Abraham through Jacob and inheritors of what we Christians would call the first covenant, that is, the promise that God made to Abraham and renewed to Moses. Christians hold that this original covenant was replaced by a new covenant prophecied in Jeremiah 31: 31-34, fulfilled through the atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and commemorated in the Holy Eucharist. This new covenant instituted by Christ includes among God’s chosen people all those who have the Holy Spirit dwelling in their hearts, whether Gentile or Jew. But of course Jews do not recognize that a new convenant has been implemented by God. They believe in the original covenant to Abraham, and thus, to them, the only ones included among God’s chosen people are persons born into their large extended family– descendants of Abraham and Jacob, AND those who are adopted into their family, i.e., people who are properly converted by Orthodox Rabbis. We Christians believe we are reconciled to God by our faith, but Jews believe they are reconciled to God by being members of God’s special family and by observing God’s rules handed down to their ancestors.
K and R: How can one prove one’s mother is Jewish? T his would require a geneology of intolerable length, would it not? Who testifies that the mother is a Jew? And her mother? Since the dispersion, maintaining such coherence is patently impossible.
Moreover, what is it that Mum has transmitted to the child? A gene? And if she doesn’t observe “God’s rules handed down” – as so many “jewish” mothers in America do not – what then? The answers above seem to me to be quite unsatisfactory. To say, “I don’t obey any of God’s rules, or even believe in a God, but I am still a Jew” is the same thing as saying “I am a Christian only I don’t obey any of God’s rules, or even believe in a God, but I am still a Christian” strikes me as absolute nonsense. LM
In answer to the second part of your question, Larry, Jews have a term for Jews who do not keep God’s rules handed down: non-observant Jew, or, more pejoratively, self-hating Jew. Being a Jew has nothing to do with a profession of faith. Observant Jews consider themselves a people, a very special people chosen by God to be his people. Judaism is a modern manifestation of an ancient tribal religion. To be a Jew you have to be a member of one of the twelve tribes descended from Jacob, AKA, Israel. As is true for membership in all tribes, you are either born or adopted into it.
The Samaritans of Jesus’ day were also observers of the law of Moses and considered themselves his disciples. But they were hated by those who considered themselves true Jews, and one of the major reasons for the hatred was that they had profligately intermarried with Gentiles and polluted the bloodlines of God’s people.
The theology is still there. You need to observe the rules to be reconciled to God, and there are consequences if you do not. But the fact that you do not observe the rules does not make you not a Jew, anymore than a teenager who disobeys his father every chance he gets would thereby lose his membership in his family. Belief does not make a person Jewish. Being a Jew is more akin to being Japanese or American Indian than it is akin to being a Christian.
Jews don’t really evangelize. Most people who convert do so because they marry, or want to marry, someone who is an observant Jew. But if someone wants to become a Jew, he would have to go to the rabbis and ask. They are not going to come to him and try to convince him to convert.
To Jews, God is the husband and the nation of Israel, the Jewish people, is the bride. Non-observant Jews are unfaithful spouses, but spouses nonetheless. To Christians, God is the husband and the church, the body of Christ, has replaced Israel as the bride. We have to profess faith in Christ to be part of the church, rather than simply be born into it.
I think the article is all about how difficult it is to prove that one’s mother is Jewish. Basically, you need to prove that she was matrilineally descended from someone who was a known Jew, or at least, from someone the rabbinic authorities will accept was a Jew.
Rick is correct. The theology of Judaism is that the Jews AS A FAMILY have a special unbreakable covenant with God. This covenant would exist even if the person was adopted and didn’t even know they were Jewish and was raised Christian. It exists even if the person stands up and renounces Judaism in the strongest terms. In this theology, a Jew can never NOT be a Jew. In this theology, Cardinal Lustinger was in a special covenental relationship with God as a function of being a Jew.
A Jew is defined as someone whose mother was a Jew. If you want to PROVE that you are a Jew (as you must do if you wish to be married by an Orthodox rabbi) then you must prove that your mother was a Jew. This can most easily be done by showing that she was married by an Orthodox rabbi, thus demonstrating that at some point her own bona fides were approved by an Orthodox rabbi. Problem is that now American Jews have to go back quite a ways to find somebody on the maternal line that was Orthodox — not that BEING Orthodox matters, but it means that you could find proof that an Orthodox rabbi had accepted them as a Jew, either by marrying them or by allowing them to be buried in a Jewish cemetary. (Not only are non-Jews not allowed to be buried in Jewish cemetaries but it sometimes happens in Israel that the rabbis decide that someone who was buried there was actually NOT a Jew and they dig them up and remove them.) Hence the search for grandmother’s or great grandmother’s Orthodox wedding certificates or gravestones in Orthodox cemetaries. This problem is going to get worse as time goes on.
Actually, this is not quite correct. A “self-hating” Jew is anybody who criticizes Judaism, Israel, or the Jewish people. It has absolutely nothing to do with level of religious observance. By definition, a convert to Christianity would be the ultimate in a “self-hating” Jew. The secular leadership of Israel is by no means ever called “self-hating” unless they criticize the settler movement or the treatment of Palestinians, in which case it is obvious 🙂 that they do so because deep down inside they hate all Jews and thus hate themselves as well. All members of “Peace Now” are called “self-hating” Jews by the right-wing.
Catholic Mom, I stand corrected.
21. I too stand corrected. LM