Government says new conversion authority will streamline process

The Prime Minister's Office is considering forming a special panel for reviewing complaints by conversion candidates, Cabinet Secretary Oved Yehezkel said this week.

Yehezkel spoke Wednesday after the government approved a new state conversion authority aimed at attracting some 350,000 non-Jewish immigrants living in Israel. The complaints review body, he said, would work under the new authority. However, activists cast doubts on the efficacy of the planned conversion authority.

Yehezkel, who spoke to Anglo File exclusively on this subject, was responding to criticism from people and organizations involved in assisting converts.

Activists like Rabbi Shaul Farber, founder of the Jerusalem-based Itim Jewish Life Information Center, said they would have little faith in the new conversion authority's ability to streamline the process for converts and help resolve what they see as failings in the current system. The current conversion process has long been criticized as overly stringent regarding aspiring converts, who often complain about arbitrary disqualifications by the rabbinic tribunals responsible for recognizing them. Other grievances pertain to allegedly deliberate foot-dragging by the tribunals, unnecessary double-inspections of non-Jewish spouses seeking to become Jewish, intrusive probing and unreasonable delays.

Farber said he was concerned these "failings" might go unaddressed because the authority's proposed structure included no explicit reference to a complaints department.

He said he feared the authority, slated to become operational in four months, would shortchange the review issue. The conversion process typically takes several years if not more.

The ministerial committee on absorption affairs, which approved the plan, seeks to change the current situation where the various stages of conversion - training, inspection and approval - are the responsibility of a myriad of independent institutions. The Jewish Agency, for example, is responsible for running many preparatory courses which operate independently of the Chief Rabbinate's conversion tribunals that approve conversions. The new authority seeks to bundle together these disparate components into one single body. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar will supervise all religious aspects of the new body's work. The authority's chair will be Rabbi Haim Druckman, who currently heads the Conversion Authority in the PMO.

The new entity will receive an initial budget of over NIS 15 million and add 10 salaried rabbinic judges to the 22 currently serving in the conversion courts. According to the Absorption Ministry and the PMO - the two bodies that promoted the new authority's formation - the additional judges will alleviate bureaucratic backlog.

But activists in the field across Israel said backlog was never the problem, adding they were concerned this was an indication the reform focuses on the wrong issues. "There is no need to add new judges. It will only make the system wasteful and bloated," an official from the Chief Rabbinate who is involved with conversions said on condition of anonymity. "What needs to change is the callous approach by some people in the system." Itim's Farber added, "More rabbinic judges don't mean better rabbinic judges. It seems that under this new authority, converts will continue to be subject to the whims of rabbinic court administrators who are not required to give explanations on why they refuse or delay requests."

The problem, the activists say, lies in the attitude of the same officials who have been allowed to retain their positions and will continue to act as "a thorn in the system's side by protracting the process, issuing arbitrary refusals and driving aspiring converts away from Judaism," as one conversion coach from the north told Anglo File on condition of anonymity.

See CONVERT, page A6