IDF program quietly carries out nearly half Israel's conversions - Haaretz

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Tue., October 02, 2007 ,

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IDF program quietly carries out nearly half Israel's conversions

By Anshel Pfeffer

The Israel Defense Forces, with the help of the Jewish Agency and Absorption Ministry, has been carrying out a quiet revolution in conversion over the last few years.

Yesterday a reception held in the prime minister's sukkah honored the 2,000th convert participating in the Nativ program.

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In a little more than five years, 2,213 people were converted as part of the program. What is even more impressive is that in the past year alone, of the nearly 2,000 conversions that took place in Israel, excluding the special program for Ethiopian Jews, nearly half were carried out in the IDF.

Those who have witnessed the disagreements between the various ministries and the rabbis over issues of authority and procedure, believe the IDF program offers the best possible solution to the problem. The hope now is that some of the rabbis, who are raising objections on matters of conversion, will not try to disrupt the IDF program.

The initiative to set up the special conversion program in the IDF came from the Human Resources Directorate, Major General Elazar Stern, who at the time was the chief education officer. Stern discovered that many of the new conscripts were asking to take their oaths of loyalty with a New Testament and not the Torah.

According to IDF statistics, some 6,000 new immigrants are serving in the IDF who are not Jewish according to halakha.

A rabbinical court has been in place in the IDF for decades, but until the new program was initiated six years ago, only several dozen soldiers were converted over the years.

Starting in 2002, the Education Corps and the Jewish Agency's Jewish Studies Institute, established in the late 1990s to address the issue of conversion, joined forces to launch the project.

The two formed Nativ, in which the soldiers undergo an intensive seven-week course called the "Jewish-Zionist Identity Program," which then enables them to apply to two seminars that prepare them for conversion.

Initially there was opposition to the program, according to Professor Benjamin Ish-Shalom, chairman of the JA's Institute. The rabbis were reluctant to acknowledge that the kind of preparation being offered in non-religious settings could contribute to a formal conversion process.

"The rabbis were opposed to the fact that we were completing the entire process in a few months," says Nehemia Citroen, director of the institute. "They were accustomed to conversion taking a full year."

A long process of dialogue, and exposing rabbis to all the lessons the converts undergo, led them to agree to accept the soldiers as full-fledged converts.

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