Twenty-nine percent of all immigrants to Israel this past year were not Jewish, the Interior Ministry revealed last week.
The figure surfaced at a May 25 meeting of the Knesset’s Immigration and Absorption Committee, and prompted calls from the fervently Orthodox to repeal the Law of Return. The law grants immigration and citizenship rights to all Jews and their families.
Yair Tsaban, minister of immigrant absorption from the liberal Meretz party, defended the status quo, saying the non-Jewish immigrants were generally spouses of Jews and their immigration was a move against assimilation and loss.
The Law of Return is seen as symbolizing the Jewish character of the State of Israel.
It has also served as a lightning rod for the Orthodox parties in their effort to implement their vision of a Jewish state. For years, there were efforts to amend the law’s definition of who is a Jew, to exclude non-Orthodox conversions.
Now, with the continuing mass immigration from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, attention has been focused on the clauses permitting anyone who is the grandchild of a Jew to be recognized as a Jew for the purposes of immigration and citizenship and extending those privileges to non-Jewish spouses.
In one case, a member of the Falash Mora group, Ethiopians whose ancestors converted from Judaism to Christianity, recently converted to Judaism and then immigrated with dozens of his family.
HELPING THOSE ‘IT WAS NOT INTENDED FOR’
For Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, from the fervently Orthodox Degel HaTorah party, the figures point to a need to repeal or radically reformulate the Law of Return. “It is clearly being used to help those it was not intended for,” said Ravitz, “thousands, hundreds of thousands of non-Jews. They are exploiting us, and this is the only country the Jews have.”
Ravitz pointed to what he termed “wholesale fraud” by immigrants passing themselves off as Jewish. In his opinion, the number of non-Jewish immigrants is far higher than 29 percent.
He said these immigrants do not yearn to be in Israel but are intent to leave their country, and Israel is virtually the only country available.
Some, he said, are downright anti-Semitic. Others, and not merely individuals but entire communities, continue to observe Christian festivals, he said.
But Tsaban implied that Ravitz was trying to revive the concept of “conversion according to halacha” (rabbinic law) in the section of the Law of Return which seeks to define Jews who were not born of Jewish mothers.
By letting the Jewish partner immigrate with the entire family, said Tsaban, the Law of Return enables them all to be part of the Jewish state.
“But above all,” said Tsaban, “we have to remember the immense contribution to the life of our country that immigration makes.”
In all, he said, more than 600,000 people had immigrated to Israel in the past four years.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
