Rabbinate’s Council Pressures Nrp Ministers to Resign from Cabinet on Conversion Issue

The Chief Rabbinate’s Council adopted a secret resolution last week that would force the three ministers of the National Religious Party to resign from the Cabinet unless the government yields on Orthodox demands to invalidate conversions to Judaism by Reform or other non-Orthodox rabbis, the newspaper Maariv reported today. Questioned by JTA, the Chief Rabbinate’s secretary refused to confirm or deny the report. He admitted that there was a “secret paragraph” in the decisions taken at the meeting of the Rabbinate’s Council last Thursday. The Rabbinate has demanded that the government initiate a law that would preclude the recognition of conversions performed by non-Orthodox rabbis abroad as well as in Israel. This position is more extreme than that of the NRP which asked for legislation that would invalidate conversions by Reform rabbis in Israel. At its meeting last Thursday, the Council also reaffirmed its opposition to the recent Knesset definition of a Jew, declaring that the non-inclusion of an Orthodox-only stricture has created a “dangerous situation.” The Knesset had ruled that a Jew was a person born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism, but it did not require that conversions be performed according to halachic (Orthodox) law.