CONVERSION RATE: Jonathan Rosenblum addresses the annulment by the Ashdod Beit Din of an Orthodox conversion and other conversion issues.

Who is really to blame?

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post
June 1, 2007

No one would deny that the decision of an Ashdod beit din to annul the conversion of one of the parties in a divorce action was an immense personal tragedy. The children of the woman whose conversion was retroactively annulled 15 years later have had their lifetime identity as Jews suddenly shattered.

The decision to convert - i.e., to accept the yoke of mitzvot - is perhaps the most momentous a person can make precisely because it can never be reversed. From the viewpoint of halacha, just as a born Jew can never shed that status, so too a sincere convert. That much is clear.

Less clear, however, is who is responsible for last week's tragedy. The most obvious candidate, of course, is the beit din that annulled the conversion. And indeed most fingers were pointed at Rabbi Avraham Attias, who authored the opinion of the beit din, as soon as its decision was reported in the secular press. The usual calls were heard to turn conversion matters over to "open-minded" national-religious rabbis, and even to "progressive" rabbis, to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated.

I WONDER how many of those calling for Rabbi Attias's scalp remember that Rabbi Shlomo Goren "freed" a brother and sister from the halachic status of mamzerut by voiding their mother's marriage at the time of their conception. And that was done, in turn, by voiding her husband's conversion, despite the fact that he had been living as a fully observant Jew for decades. For his promise to "solve" the problem of two mamzerim, Rabbi Goren was rewarded by prime minister Golda Meir with appointment as the Ashkenazi chief rabbi and became a national hero.

The truth is that tragedies like that in Ashdod happen all the time. I have known personally a number of children of those converted by Reform or Conservative rabbis who discovered that they were not recognized as Jewish by a large swath of world Jewry when they began to explore their Judaism seriously for the first time, or when they wanted to marry an Orthodox boy or girl. I have even heard of young men learning in some of the world's top yeshivot who found out that their mother never had a proper conversion. For clergymen to perform a conversion without telling the would-be convert that it will not be recognized by many other Jews is a breach of fiduciary duty.

The only difference in the Ashdod case was that the woman whose conversion was annulled had been converted by a beit din composed of Orthodox rabbis. Yet, the woman admitted, the beit din had apparently made no effort to ascertain whether she intended to accept the halachic system as binding upon her. She had never kept some of the most basic and stringent aspects of halacha after her conversion.

Orthodox rabbis - even some with long white beards - who perform conversions without making any effort to ascertain the candidate's commitment to mitzvah observance, and often in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, is, unfortunately, also an old story.

There was a German girl in my ulpan class 30 years ago who was living at a nearby kibbutz. She was personally converted by then-Chief Rabbi Goren late in her ninth month of pregnancy. When I asked her whether Rabbi Goren had inquired about the likelihood of her keeping mitzvot on the completely secular kibbutz, she laughed. "Right," she said, "a little German girl is going to come here and tell a group of German Holocaust survivors that they should make the dining hall kosher."

In the famous Seidman case, Rabbi Goren personally converted a woman who had repeatedly stressed that she saw no need for an Orthodox conversion and had no intention of becoming mitzva observant in order to forestall a civil marriage law in the Knesset.

IT IS NOT those who uphold strict standards for conversion who show a lack of love and concern for the convert, but rather those who ignore the halachic requirement of a sincere commitment to mitzva observance. The latter expose those "converted" under their auspices to the danger of a painful shock many years later when they discover that their conversion is not universally recognized.

A universally recognized standard is the greatest protection for the sincere convert, and the implementation of such a standard by responsible rabbinical courts is the key to the complete integration of the sincere convert into the Jewish people, without any concern that someone will someday question his or her conversion.

Two weeks ago, I participated in a three-day seminar sponsored by the Eternal Jewish Family (EJF) organization in Phoenix, Arizona. The participants were 32 intermarried couples in each of which the non-Jewish spouse is contemplating conversion. (The leading contemporary halachic decisors have ruled that in the case of intermarried couples, the general rule that "the right hand pushes away" the would-be convert does not apply.)

The Phoenix seminar was the second of its kind. Of the 32 couples who participated in the first, 28 are on track to a full halachic conversion for the gentile spouse. One couple from the first seminar was halachically married at the Phoenix seminar. Another seven seminars sponsored by EJF are scheduled around the world for the coming year, each at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Working with intermarried couples is only part of what EJF does. The organization also promotes a universally accepted standard for conversion. It has already sponsored numerous conferences for rabbinical court judges in the United States and Israel, and one is scheduled in the near future for Europe.

The two-fold efforts of EJF provide irrefutable proof that concern for universally recognized standards of conversion goes hand-in-hand with the greatest love and respect for the convert.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Conversions and Beit Din and Halacha and Jewish Law.

"THE MAKING OF A MARTYR": About the movie, which will be playing on Tuesday at the Cobble Hill Cinema on 265 Court Street in Brooklyn.

In 2004, 24-year-old Brooke Goldstein spent her summer in the West Bank filming more than five hours of in-person interviews with terrorists — all of which she conducted without a bodyguard and without a weapon. A Cardozo Law student with a fashion model's high cheekbones and long blond hair, Ms. Goldstein came face-to-face with Zacaria Zubeidah, a notorious recruiter of child suicide bombers. She interviewed suicide bombers' families and children, who aspire to "martyrdom." The resulting film, "The Making of a Martyr," will screen as part of the Brooklyn International Film Festival on Saturday and Tuesday.

...In fact, the fanaticism was worse than she ever imagined. "The most shocking thing was reconciling the normal appearance of these kids and what was coming out of their mouths," she said. "I was holding these beautiful children in my lap, and my translator was translating words of hate."

The story was always the same. "No child ever said, ‘I don't want to be a martyr.' They talked about fame, paradise, virgins, and Ferris wheels [after death]. They were happy to tell me they hated Jews," she said.

Technorati Tag: The Making Of A Marty and Brooke Goldstein.

ISRAEL IS HELD TO A 'DISPROPORTIONATELY' HIGHER STANDARD: The Chicago Sun-Times on the double standard:

Israel is constantly warned by the likes of the European Parliament not to react "disproportionately" to Palestinian violence, without anyone ever quite defining what would be proportionate.

It seems logical that in the current crisis that a proportionate response would be for the Israelis to return the fire in the same manner they are suffering it, i.e., launch rockets toward the Gaza Strip. But the Israelis won't resort with this form of retaliation because their society won't tolerate the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Palestinian terrorists defend their attacks on Israeli civilians by describing them as part of the human infrastructure that sustains the "occupation." Using similar logic, the Israelis could see all Palestinians as the enemy. After all, in what everybody reminds us was a democratic election, the Palestinians put into government the terrorist party Hamas that refuses to recognize the right of Israel's existence and has murdered many Israelis to underscore that point. The Palestinians made their choice, it could be argued, just as the Germans backed the Nazis, and we didn't let qualms about civilian casualties stop us and the British from bombing German cities.

But, no, we live in a different world. Well, most of us do. Not only their own revulsion at targeting civilians, but the civilized world's abhorrence of it means the Israelis take pains to aim their reprisals at the terrorists. But the expectations of, for instance, the Europeans are markedly different for the Palestinians. No atrocity, no suicide bombing shredding the flesh of teenage girls, no massacre seems enough to give the Europeans more than a momentary pause. Then it's back to their default position of excusing Palestinian wretched excesses, citing the "occupation."

It would be nice to see more editorials like this.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestinians.

NETANYAHU ON THE BRITISH ACADEMIC BOYCOTT:


[Hat tip: One Jerusalem]

Technorati Tag: Netanyahu and Academic Boycott.

IF ISRAEL HAD KIDNAPPED ALAN JOHNSTON: Here is a little thought experiment from The Telegraph:

Watching the horrible video of Alan Johnston of the BBC broadcasting Palestinian propaganda under orders from his kidnappers, I found myself asking what it would have been like had he been kidnapped by Israelis, and made to do the same thing the other way round.

The first point is that it would never happen. There are no Israeli organisations - governmental or freelance - that would contemplate such a thing. That fact is itself significant.

But just suppose that some fanatical Jews had grabbed Mr Johnston and forced him to spout their message, abusing his own country as he did so. What would the world have said?

Feel free to compare notes.

And here is the extra-credit bonus question:

How can we have got ourselves into a situation in which we half-excuse turbaned torturers for kidnapping our fellow-citizens while trying to exclude Jewish biochemists from lecturing to our students?

[Hat tip: Powerline]

Technorati Tag: Israel and Alan Johnston.

A PREVIEW ON HOW THE MEDIA WILL COVER SIX DAY WAR: Martin Peretz of The New Republic gives a sample of how The New York Times remembers The Six Day War:

When you don't know history or forget it you confabulate the past. Sometimes in grand dimensions. And sometimes in smaller ones. But even small distortions tell big lies. And that's what, I regret to say, is what The New York Times has done... again.

On May 28, the Times published an obit for Indar Jit Rikhye, a former general in the Indian Army and a decorated officer in the British military during World War II, who died at 86 a week earlier in Charlottesville, Virginia. The real reason for the paper's substantial necrologue for Rikhye was that he had been for more than a decade a commander of U.N. peacekeeping forces on four continents. That's why I recognized his name. He was on the spot when the United Nations Emergency Forces (UNEF), which had been placed in the Sinai as a buffer between Israel and Egypt as part of the settlement of the 1956 Suez crisis, withdrew from the area on demand from Gamal Abdel Nasser who was mobilizing for war and desperately wanted UNEF out of his way. Alas, for Nasser and the whole portentous Nasserist ideology, the war turned out to be the Six Day War.

Here's is how the Times' obituarist, Warren Hoge, describes the situation: "(Rikhye) oversaw the withdrawal of the United Nations Emergency Force in Gaza and the Sinai in June 1967, when it found itself in the path of the advancing Israel Defense Forces and had all its vehicles wrecked, its communications knocked out and three of its soldiers killed."

Everyone in the media is going to try to find a new angle on The Six Day War.
Expect more of the same.

UPDATE:

Powerline provides The New York Times correction, which came 4 days later:

An obituary on Monday about Indar Jit Rikhye, an Indian general who was a top adviser to United Nations peacekeepers, referred incompletely to the circumstances of the withdrawal overseen by General Rikhye of the United Nations Emergency Force in Gaza and the Sinai in June 1967. While he and some peacekeepers were caught in the path of Israeli forces, the Israelis were not responsible for their expulsion. Egypt had expelled the peacekeepers from Sinai and Gaza in mid-May, which Israel viewed as part of an Egyptian plan for war. General Rikhye — who was trying to appeal that expulsion — and some men remained. When Israel pre-emptively attacked Egypt in early June, starting the Six-Day War, the remaining peacekeepers were in their path. [emphasis added]

The New York Times: All The News That's Fit To Print (more or less).

Technorati Tag: Israel and Six Day War and New York Times and Media Bias and Warren Hoge and Indar Jit Rikhye.

LETTER FRLOM SDEROT RESERVISTS TO OLMERT: When your approval rating hits 'rock bottom' and keeps falling, this is what happens. Translated--with correction--by IMRA:

The following is IMRA's translation of the abbreviated text as published in today's edition of Yediot Ahronot with the correction broadcast on Israel Radio at 10:00 AM this morning.

Israel Radio correspondent Nissim Keinan reported that the leaders of the reserve soldiers told him that the final version of the letter they gave Yediot Ahronot did not say that they would not serve - but instead "find it difficult" but the paper opted to publish an earlier draft of the letter.

Mr. Ehud Olmert
Prime Minister
Prime Minister's Office - Jerusalem

Greetings,

Re: Letter of Sderot Reserve Soldiers

We are residents of Sderot who are reserve soldiers and officers. We were inculcated with the values of Zionism, Judaism and sacrifice for the State and its citizens. We believed that service in the IDF is a right and an obligation on behalf of the State of Israel and all its residents and that only this way is it possible to insure the existence of a safe home for the Jewish People of Israel and the Diaspora.

Last summer we were called for the war in the North and we went out of a feeling of reciprocal pact, national obligation and common fate with the residents of the North. We feel that this pact was violated by the Government of Israel in Sderot and the communities adjacent to Gaza!

With a heavy heart and feelings of harsh disappointment we are writing this letter. We have already lost the ability to live normal civilian lives in our homes. Already for several years we cannot play with our children in the playgrounds or send them without fear to the parks and schools.

We have stopped believing that someone is doing everything he can in order to protect us. We cannot accept that our children and the rest of the residents of the region will continue to be the canon fodder of the State of Israel.

We have decided in light of the existing situation in which we are abandoned and our dear ones are unprotected without hope on the front - we find it difficult to do reserve duty and protect the rest of the residents of Israel!

We demand that the State of Israel draft all of its resources in order to grant us security again. If the State cannot provide us this basic need we ask to be evacuated to other places.

In a state where every man is for himself we have no alternative.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Sderot and Olmert.

WAITING FOR GODOT WOULD BE QUICKER: Following the advice of Robert Aumann--winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in game-theory--Jonathan Rosenblum concludes that "in the meantime, our only strategy is to wait patiently for some change in the Palestinian mindset."

Just Wait

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Yated Ne'eman
May 30, 2007

Former head of the National Security Council Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland delineated in a recent speech in Jerusalem a number of reasons why Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations are doomed to failure within current paradigms.

The first is the rise of Islamist fundamentalism among the Palestinians. As Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak said bluntly last week, "Hamas will never sign a peace agreement with Israel." And for a very simple reason: It cannot. According to Hamas theology, any land that has ever been under Islamic sovereignty attains the status of dar-al-Islam and belongs to the Muslim Wakf. As such it can never be ceded, and all Muslims are under a religious duty to recapture the territory lost to infidels.

Even if hard-core Hamas support were only 15% of the Palestinian population, as Eiland believes, that would be sufficient to disrupt any peace treaty with Israel. But, in fact, the unwillingness to accept Israel’s existence, within any borders, has always been central to Palestinian and pan-Arab thought.

In his new book, former CIA director George Tenet describes Yasir Arafat as "always wanting one more thing. [A]nd one more thing was never enough because what he really wanted was for the peace process to be ever-active and eternally unresolved." As long as the process flickered, he could always hope to extract new concessions from Israel, without ever having to make good on any of his promises.

The refusal to accept Israel’s existence has only become more entrenched on the Palestinian side in the aftermath of the Oslo process, under which an entire generation of Palestinian youth has been raised to see its highest calling in life as martyring oneself to kill as many Jews as possible.

Next there is not enough land or water between the Mediterranean and the Jordan for the growing Palestinian and Israeli populations. As a consequence, the maximum that any Israeli government is prepared to give is far less than any Palestinian leader would ever be prepared to accept, whether with respect to territory, Jerusalem, or the "refugee problem." And that gap has only widened since the breakdown of Oslo.

Israel’s fundamental mistake, according to Eiland, has been to treat the Palestinian problem as one that is within its capacity to solve alone. What is needed now is start looking outside the paradigm of two states between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Such efforts would include territorial contributions to a Palestinian state from Egypt and Jordan, in return for lucrative economic incentives. (Eiland, for instance, suggests allowing Egypt and Jordan to dig an underground tunnel across the Gulf of Aqaba that would allow for the creation of a Red Sea port that would quickly become the primary transit point between the Gulf States and Europe, and therefore an economic gold mine.)

Then there is the problem of the order of obligations under any peace treaty. Israelis are no longer in the mood to follow the Oslo model of territorial concessions in return for Palestinian promises. Israeli prime ministers may continue to insist that they are prepared to evacuate thousands of Israelis from their homes, but only after Palestinian terrorism stops. Meanwhile Palestinian leaders say they can only act against the terrorists after the parameters of a political settlement are clear.

Finally, there is no reason to trust in the intention or ability of Palestinian leaders to deliver on their promises. Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking has long been plagued by an overemphasis on promises made by Palestinian leaders without any consideration of whether those promises command any popular support. Even if Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s long-time right-hand man, were sincere about making peace with Israel, he has consistently shown himself unwilling to take any risk and therefore incapable of delivering on any promise.

Palestinian promises have repeatedly proven themselves not to be worth the paper they were written on – whether in Lebanon in the ‘70s, Jordan prior to Black September, or with Israel. Since the Saudi-brokered Mecca agreement between Hamas and Fatah, Ha’aretz’s Zev Schiff notes, there have already been five cease-fire agreements. And after each one, lethal fire was resumed within hours.

The population of the Gaza Strip – already one of the densest on earth – is projected to grow to 2.5 million by 2020. The situation in Gaza is already one of anarchic clan warfare today, and will only go worse as the population grows and all resources are plowed into arms rather than economic development. The resultant instability will inevitably spill across the border into Israel, and doom any peace agreement, even if the technical problems could be overcome.

MOST ISRAELIS RECOGNIZE this reality. Yet there remains a strong impulse to run after will-o'-the-whisp hints of peace, such as those currently coming from Damascus, or at the very least a feeling that Israel must ever be ready to entertain any peace initiative and begin negotiations in order to demonstrate its eagerness for peace.

In a recent lecture to foreign journalists, however, Robert Aumann, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in game-theory, argued that these impulses must be suppressed for our survival. Israel, he said, must stop conveying the impression to the Arabs of being desperate for peace at any price.

The Arab strategy is not to defeat Israel in battle, but to gradually wear down Israel and make life unbearable. Time, the Arabs feel, is on their side. The key for Israel, then, is to convince the Arabs that "We have time; we have patience; we have stamina." But Israel’s weariness, its various capitulations, gestures, convergence plans have only served to convince our Arab "cousins" that "we no longer have spiritual strength, that we have no time, that we are calling for a time-out."

Over the past quarter century, there has been a sea change in the Israeli consensus about the contours of a future peace with the Palestinians. That change has not been met by any reciprocal movement on the Palestinian side. Instead Palestinian attitudes on refugees, the status of Jerusalem, terror have only hardened. Now it is time for the Palestinians to show some willingness to compromise.

The horrified journalists responded to Aumann’s argument by pointing out again and again that if Israel adopts the waiting strategy he advocates there is no possibility of peace in the near future. To which he kept responding in the same way. True, there is no hope in the near future. But unless the Palestinians become convinced that the Jews are here to stay, and start thinking about building their own society, there will be no peace in the long-run either.

In the meantime, our only strategy is to wait patiently for some change in the Palestinian mindset.

Read Jonathan Rosenblum's other articles at Jewish Media Resources.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Hamas.

A REVIVAL OF SEPHARDIC HERITAGE IN SPAIN: From the LA Times:

...Now, more than five centuries after Spain violently expelled its Jews, the country is experiencing a revival of interest in Sephardic heritage — and neither Oceransky nor the 40,000 other Jews living here feel as though they have to whisper about their identity.

In fact, Sephardic culture has seen a boom in Spain in recent years. There's Noah Gordon's international bestseller, "The Last Jew" (set during the Spanish Inquisition), and the 2004 Spanish comedy "Only Human", as well as conferences, music festivals, and even restaurants specializing in Sephardic cuisine. The biggest splash is the government-sponsored initiative known as Caminos de Sefarad, or Sephardic Routes, a network linking 15 medieval Jewish cities across Spain on the first-ever travel itinerary through the diaspora in Spain.

Unlike Berlin and Prague, Czech Republic, and other European cities where a lost Jewish heritage has been a cultural steppingstone for years — and where old Jewish quarters, synagogues and cemeteries are almost mandatory tourist stops — the curiosity in Spain's Jewish sites has grown up almost overnight.

There is criticism of Sephardic Routes as well, but it's a start.

Technorati Tag: Spain and Sephardim and Jews.

MOSQUE-ING THE TRUTH: Samuel Katz writes about Islam's ties--or lack thereof--to Jerusalem:

Al-Ghazzali, the great 11th-century Muslim theologian, wrote: "Know that a lie is not haram [wrong] in itself, but only because the evil conclusions to which it leads the hearer, making him believe something that is not really the case… If a lie is the only way of obtaining a good result, it is permissible.… We must lie when truth leads to unpleasant results."

Thus the most startling item in the Arabs' propaganda is their usurpation of the Jewish patrimony of Jerusalem. Arab political propaganda claims that Jerusalem is an "Arab city," has been an Arab city for many centuries, and is a holy city in Islam. There is only one small grain of truth in this claim, which on the whole is as false as the quite common description of Palestine as "a land holy to three faiths."

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Jerusalem and Islam.