No more conversion

About a week ago, Channel 1's "Mabat Sheni" (A Second Look) aired Michal Kapra's report about three soldiers who were among the recipients of a tzalash (a citation for bravery in combat) for their behavior during the Second Lebanon War. The three, natives of the Commonwealth of Independent States, immigrated to Israel with their families, but have not yet completed the conversion process. To be less politically correct, they are "Russians" rather than Jews.

Recently, the prime minister's bureau promised to ease the conversion process of the approximately 300,000 new immigrants who are not Jews according to halakha (religious law). A nice promise, which is encountering an opposite trend in the religious establishment. The Hardal (ultra-Orthodox nationalist) rabbis make things difficult for the converts, keep track of their families in order to ensure that they are observing religious law and force them to send their children to religious kindergartens.

There is no end to the absurd regulations they invent. For example, the husband of a woman convert is not allowed to come near his wife for three months, as the rabbis say they must be certain that she did not become pregnant while waiting for approval of her conversion. Otherwise it is impossible to know whether the child will be a non-Jew who requires conversion, or a Jew.

One could presumably expect the prime minister's bureau to operate with determination in order to ease the conversion process. In fact, anyone following the developments on the issue of conversion since the beginning of the major immigration from the former Soviet Union (FSU) knows that there is no chance of that. The Ne'eman Committee, the Conversion Administration, Israel Defense Forces conversions and Na'aleh (a program for immigrant high-school students) conversions - none of them has succeeded in rescuing conversion from strangulation.

Why do the "Russians" need conversion at all? Those in favor of conversion claim that since the immigrants came to Israel by dint of their connection to Judaism, and are interested in joining the Jewish nation, they should be allowed to be defined as a "Jew" in their ID cards. Even people who are totally secular are convinced that otherwise it will be difficult to establish the definition of Jewish nationality in Israel. Moreover, they cite studies that prove that non-Jewish youth suffer from a feeling of alienation and occasionally even descend into crime.

It is true that the rejected youth should be made welcome. But Israel is a country of immigration, and immigrants in every country suffer from various levels of alienation and rejection, until most of them merge into the central stream. The immigrants from the FSU have outstanding human resources for accelerating this process.

The desire to solve every type of social ostracism by religious means has already proven to be a bitter mistake. Many Jews of North African or Middle Eastern origin who were afraid that the veteran Ashkenazim confuse them with Arabs, and see them as citizens of the lowest type, have been swept up in the Shas-led process of returning to religion, so that they could define themselves as more Jewish. And thus, instead of a culturally enriching process of integration, an anti-civic, sectoral mentality has been created, which encourages withdrawal from society and delays integration.

It is hard to understand why so many Israelis are making the mistake of identifying religion with nationality, in accordance with the philosophy of the religious right. Israel is the home of every Jew, whether he observes mitzvot or rejects them. Anyone who has been discriminated against because of his Jewishness has a right to have the gates of this country opened to him, without anyone checking his religious credentials.

In retrospect, the immigrants are gradually being absorbed into society, but in addition to the usual problems that cause immigrants to feel excluded and which are supposed to become blurred over time - the study of the language and absorption at work - and in spite of the military service that in Israel offers a unique route for mobility, the religious-Orthodox barrier is causing this normal process to fail.

It prevents people from getting married, marks their children as "other," buries them outside the fence and defines them as "without religion" or "Christians." Because of it, they consider themselves second-class citizens even if they received a tzalash and excelled at work and studies.

The problem is not only that of the "Russians." As long as Israeli society is not liberated from the religious establishment, it will find it difficult to pave the way for a renewed definition of the meaning of Jewish existence in a sovereign state. The time has come to give up on conversion, to erase the slot for "nationality" in the ID card and to legalize civil marriage for all. The key to nationality must finally be expropriated from the ultra-Orthodox nationalist gatekeepers.