Last update - 00:00 19/03/2007
Reform leaders vow to increase influence in Israel
By The Associated Press
World leaders of Reform Judaism on Monday vowed to launch a new effort
to garner greater support among Israelis despite what they called continuing discrimination at the hands of the Orthodox religious establishment in Israel.
Reform Judaism, a liberal, egalitarian movement, is the largest American Jewish denomination. But the movement has never caught on in large numbers in Israel, where the majority of religious Jews are Orthodox, and only a small minority Conservative or Reform.
In Israel, the Orthodox rabbinate has strenuously resisted inroads by the two liberal streams, refusing to recognize their rulings or conversions as religiously valid.
Rabbi Uri Regev, head of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, the international umbrella organization of the Reform movement, said its membership in Israel numbers in the thousands, a tiny fraction of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the country, estimated at one-third of the population of 7 million.
Regev spoke at the end of the movement's conference in Jerusalem, attended by 600 delegates from 30 countries. The World Union for Progressive Judaism was established in 1926 in London. It is active in 42 countries and is headquartered in Jerusalem.
One of the central issues at the gathering, which takes place once every four years, was the movement's desire to improve its standing in Israel, where Orthodox Judaism has a monopoly on religious practice, including marriage, burial and conversion.
For this purpose, the movement is planning a $100 million project to increase the number of Israelis involved in Reform Judaism, though Regev noted, we don't think the matter of religious equality should be subject to numerical equations.
He said polls indicated that most Israelis favor the ending the Orthodox religious monopoly in Israel.
The majority of public opinion in Israel supports freedom of choice and equality and opposes the Orthodox monopoly, which is contrary to the basic tenets of democracy and human liberties, Regev said.
Last week, the movement received a public statement of support from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, though he did not offer any concrete assurances of aid.
Olmert met with a group of Reform leaders on Thursday and assured them that he approached the movement's problems with an open mind and an open heart.
Orthodox Jewry views the more liberal streams of Judaism as a threat because of their more lenient norms of conversion and a greater openness to mixed marriages in the Jewish Diaspora. Its leaders in Israel were quick to respond to the conference, calling on Olmert to resist the call for reforming Israel's religious authorities.
"Do not give in to their pressures that bring upon us the Holocaust of assimilation and which threaten the unity of Israel with their fake conversions," ultra-Orthodox lawmaker Meir Porush wrote Olmert.