News Analysis: Conversion fracas could widen split among Jews

JERUSALEM -- As if America's Reform and Conservative movements weren't upset enough this week over the initial success of a controversial conversion bill, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused them both of "misrepresenting" the bill's intentions.

The conversion bill is hardly "the issue of earth-shattering proportions that people represent it to be," Netanyahu asserted during a briefing of Jewish journalists here Tuesday.

He met with reporters hours after the bill passed the first of three Knesset readings, or votes.

The bill would legalize the Orthodox chief rabbinate's final say over conversions performed in Israel. Until now, the rabbinate has only approved Orthodox conversions in Israel, but Israel's small Conservative and Reform movements have appealed to have their own converted members seen as bona fide Jews.

Conservative and Reform leaders say the bill delegitimizes their movements not only in Israel but in the United States, where less than 10 percent of the Jewish population identifies as Orthodox.

Netanyahu's comments could deepen internecine strife over an already divisive issue.

The prime minister, whose right-wing Likud coalition includes several ultrareligious parties backing the conversion bill, blamed the liberal religious movements for creating an uproar around the bill in the first place.

He termed as misguided the appeals by Israel's Conservative and Reform movements to Israel's High Court to halt the existing ban on non-Orthodox conversions. The court in turn ruled that Israel's conversion policy had to be formalized.

It was the move to alter the status quo that forced his governing coalition to back the Orthodox-inspired legislation, he said.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu said 99 percent of American Jews seemed to believe wrongly that the new legislation meant that Israel would refuse to recognize Reform and Conservative conversions performed in the United States.

Netanyahu said he would never allow such an erosion of the status quo. Israel, he stressed, had always recognized such conversions -- and would still do so.

Israel has never recognized Reform and Conservative conversions carried out in Israel itself. But after the Reform and Conservative movements went to court, the government was ordered to either recognize the conversions or pass a law against them.

"What I hoped would happen," Netanyahu said, "was that someone would have the good sense to remove the litigations [before the Israel courts]."

Opponents of the bill have expressed concern that once the legislation went into committee, changes would be made broadening its applications.

If the legislation does go forward, the Orthodox parties intend to attempt during the committee stage to strengthen it by also applying it to conversions carried out abroad of Israeli nationals and residents.

Netanyahu, in the meantime, blasted threats from some liberal Jewish quarters to cut off philanthropic funds to Israel or rechannel them in the wake of the conversion bill. He said such intimidations "come from uninformed circles, or, worse, from informed circles who know the truth and still threaten."

Ultimately, Netanyahu said, "creative solutions" were necessary and could come about if the attempt to change the status quo by the liberal movements was frozen.

He was clearly referring to compromise efforts led by Knesset member Alexander Lubotsky of Natan Sharansky's Third Way Party.

Secular coalition parties had threatened to torpedo the bill by opposing the vote or abstaining, leading Michael Eitan, coalition chairman of the Likud Party, to propose a compromise to ensure its passage.

All the coalition parties then backed the measure after Eitan signed a letter pledging a suspension of further steps in the legislative process, pending efforts to reach an accord with Conservative and Reform leaders.

Despite supporting the conversion bill and criticizing Conservative and Reform reactions to it, Netanyahu nonetheless lambasted a U.S. Orthodox group's formal declaration on Monday that the liberal streams are not truly Jewish.

It was "fringe elements" in the Orthodox camp in the United States and the United Kingdom that have urged against contact between their communities and non-Orthodox Jews, he said.

"I find such talks quite shocking and wholly unacceptable."

Furthermore, Netanyahu praised the non-Orthodox denominations as "indispensable parts of the Jewish world and of Judaism, vital" in keeping diaspora Jewry unified.

Inside sources said the final call on the Knesset compromise would be made in New York, where Conservative and Reform leaders said it was still too early to act.

But a short-term solution appeared unlikely, after Israeli Reform and Conservative leaders said that while they welcomed compromise efforts, they would not drop their litigation.

The bill also stirred anger among Conservative and Reform leaders.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement's Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said Tuesday that the Knesset action "upset us greatly."

The compromise proposal offers "some hope," he said, but it is too early to say whether it will resolve the dilemma or is merely a delay.

Rabbi Uri Regev, director of the Reform Israel Religious Action Center, said that while his movement would discuss a compromise, it still intends to submit more petitions to the High Court of Justice on behalf of families who adopted and converted their children overseas. Those conversions have not yet been registered by the Interior Ministry, he said.

Rabbi Einat Ramon, spokeswoman for the Conservative/Masorti movement in Israel, said, "we are very suspicious" of the compromise plan.

"If a serious negotiation goes on and something worthwhile is offered, we will consider it."

Orthodox legislators, some of whom had threatened to leave the coalition if the bill was not passed on its first reading, echoed Netanyahu in insisting that it will not change the status quo.

"There is nothing new here," said Transportation Minister Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party.

Supporters of religious pluralism in Israel also warned that the conversion law would dig a rift between Israel and world Jewry.

Jewish Agency for Israel Chairman Avraham Burg lobbied both Labor and coalition Knesset members Monday to oppose the bill.

"It can't be that on the one hand almost all the members of this House will turn to the leaders of U.S. Jewry -- the majority of whom are Reform and Conservative -- with requests for economic and political support in Israel," he said, "while they simultaneously cut them off from the Jewish people and Israeli society."