News Brief

Agudath Israel in America is a separate entity from the Agudat Yisrael party in Israel.

In Israel Wednesday, moderates within the National Religious Party, closely affiliated with the RCA, drew encouragement from the RCA statement, and urged their party to back off from its total support of the proposed amendment.

But Agudat Yisrael showed no signs of bending or wavering despite the gathering storm of protest from Diaspora leaders.

FEELING ‘DEEP AND WIDESPREAD’

Schreier of the RCA said Wednesday that he attended the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations, held last week in New Orleans, and “experienced a climate which was national and deep and widespread, and not phony.”

The RCA statement, he said, reflects a position first enacted by the organization in 1986.

Schreier said the position might represent a rift with Chabad and other Orthodox movements, “but it expresses a general concern” about the need to “still the spirit and preserve the structure of American Jewry.”

Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, spokesman for Chabad, said Tuesday that the RCA’s stance “does not make any sense.”

Israel’s Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews, “was in fact enacted by the Knesset, which is a political body. What do you mean take it out of the political arena? It’s a law in the books.”

Rabbi Moshe Sherer, president of Agudath Israel, said in a statement this week that the non-Orthodox denominations had issued a series of “false alarms” about the impact of the proposed “Who Is a Jew” legislation.

Sherer vigorously denied that the legislation would serve to delegitimize the 90 percent of American Jews who do not identify themselves as Orthodox.

“The controversy relates solely to those of the non-Jewish faith who seek conversion to Judaism, and does not impinge in the slightest on born Jews,” he said.

CHABAD UNDER ATTACK

According to a report Wednesday in the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, of the 400 Conservative and Reform Jews who immigrated to Israel from America last year, 22 were converts.

More than two-thirds of the 1,800 Americans who immigrated to Israel last year were Orthodox, the paper said.

Nevertheless, Reform and Conservative Jews say the issue goes beyond numbers and is instead a symbolic attack on their legitimacy.

The Orthodox also say they have come under attack over the issue. “For the last few weeks the Orthodox community has become the target of an unprecedented, vicious hate campaign,” said Sherer of Agudath Israel.

Schreier of RCA said he has protested “the vicious attacks in the media both from Jewish and non-Jewish circles about the Orthodox.”

According to Krinsky, Chabad came under particular attack, especially at the CJF General Assembly, where some delegates suggested individuals stop contributing to the Lubavitch if they continue to press for the amendment.

Krinsky said he was not concerned that Lubavitch would lose its backing from the non-Orthodox, which is said to be considerable.

“The Lubavitch stance is based on Jewish law and the Shulchan Aruch,” he said, referring to the code of Jewish law. “Jews were always singled out because the laws were immutable. This is not a popularity contest.”

One Orthodox group in the United States managed to agree in part both with the RCA and its detractors.

The president of the Religious Zionists of America, which supports Israel’s five-seat National Religious Party, said in a speech earlier this week that he had warned the NRP not to take the initiative in amending the Law of Return, “because the issue was tearing the American Jewish community apart.”

But Rabbi Louis Bernstein also asserted that such reconciliatory efforts “were being vitiated by the hysterical reaction of American Jewish organizations.”

(JTA correspondents David Landau in Jerusalem and Hugh Orgel in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.)