Report on rule tightening for Diaspora converts raises alarm bells among Reform

The Israeli Reform movement threatened this week to return to the High Court if the Interior Ministry goes ahead with reported plans to implement new and more rigid rules for Diaspora converts who want to immigrate to Israel.

Last week, the New York Jewish Week reported it had obtained a copy of secret interior ministry documents outlining a plan to require converts seeking to immigrate to spend at least 350 hours studying Judaism in a "recognized" Jewish community and and spend 18 months in the community in which they are converting - nine of them after the conversion - to prove their sincerity. The new rules are to be approved before the new government is installed, the newspaper said.

"This is an ongoing saga," said Rabbi Gilad Kariv, head of the local Reform community. "It goes back to [March] 2005, when the High Court deemed illegal the interior ministry's policy to demand of converts to stay in the communities where they had converted for at least 12 months. But unfortunately, it seems the ministry prefers to set criteria unilaterally, instead of engaging the different religious denominations in an ongoing dialogue. If they will actually make the proposed new guidelines official, we will go back to the Supreme Court."

According to the Jewish Week report, the new guidelines were designed to "prevent non-Jewish foreign workers who reside in Israel from converting quickly in Jewish communities overseas, and then declare Aliyah," or immigration to Israel.

The article asserts that the new guidelines are so secret "that even the ministry's spokeswoman said she was unaware of them."

In this light, some Jewish community leaders, who asked not to be identified, told Anglo File they were puzzled by the report. "The current interior minister, Meir Sheetrit [of Kadima], is on his way out; I have a hard time believing that he's working on a plan that would inevitably cause an international uproar. It just doesn't make sense."

Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad commented: "There are currently no naturalization criteria for converts, and in accordance with the 2005 court ruling... the Interior Ministry is obliged to implement criteria for reviewing citizenship requests."

Groups such as Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, and the Israel Religious Action Center have accused the ministry of not adhering to the court's decision, and the alleged attempt to institute rules that are even more strict has many in the Jewish world fuming. Hadad says the ministry is still working on compiling the criteria to implement the court's ruling.

"We respect Israel's right to protect its borders," Rabbi Kariv told Anglo File Wednesday, "and it is true that there is an ongoing attempt to abuse the Right of Return by insincere converts. But we need to find the right balance between. Unfortunately, the ministry does not seem to strike the right balance; it is acting in an arrogant way that doesn't show any respect to the communities of the Diaspora."