The Agudath Israel World Organization is launching an intensive campaign to combat efforts by liberal Jewish groups to attain religious pluralism in Israel.
“We lay the fault of the tremendous amount of assimilation in this country at the doorstep of the Reform movement,” said Rabbi Moshe Sherer, co-chairman of Agudah’s international body, referring to the United States.
“It created a brand of Judaism which we feel has enabled the masses to believe in a faith that has no basis in our religion. The same plague should not be imported to Israel,” said Sherer, who also heads Agudath Israel of America.
Alarmed by the Israeli Ministry of Education’s plans to introduce a curriculum for religious pluralism into the nation’s public schools, the Agudah last week convened here a rare meeting of its 12-person inner executive and decided to mount an advocacy campaign against the effort.
The campaign of the Agudah, which represents fervently Orthodox Jews, is the latest salvo in the ongoing debate over the historical role of Orthodox Judaism in the Jewish state.
The Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements are all involved in the effort to erode the Orthodox monopoly on religious affairs in Israel as well as the Orthodox control over personal-status issues as marriage, divorce and burial.
The Reform movement is spearheading the effort with its “Operation Equality,” a $2 million grass-roots education and lobbying campaign that has launched earlier this year.
Responding to Agudah’s announced campaign, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president-elect of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said the Reform movement’s efforts are moving ahead.
“You transmit Judaism not through coercion but through education and persuasion,” said Yoffie. “Because they fear failure, Agudath Israel is afraid to pursue that path.”
The Education Ministry’s decision to introduce a curriculum to teach about the different streams and movements within world Jewry is based on recommendations of a ministry study of ways to enhance the teaching of Judaism.
Released last year, the Shenhar report – named for Aliza Shenhar, who headed a special commission – called for pluralism to be a central focus of Jewish studies. The report was commissioned in 1991 by Zevulun Hammer of the National Religious Party, who was the education minister at the time.
Implementation of the report’s recommendations comes at a time when the ministry, for the first time in the state’s history, is headed by a minister not affiliated with any of the religious political parties.
Agudath will devote “several hundred thousand dollars, at least” to the campaign in Israel, where people “don’t understand the problem,” Sherer said.
“Israelis are really unaware of what they can expect from accepting a Judaism which has no real regulations, no requirements,” he said.
“When you have a Judaism that is whatever one wants it to be, then you end up with the tragic state of affairs” in the United States, where more than 50 percent of the Jewish population is intermarrying, he asserted.
Sherer said the campaign, which is scheduled to begin in December, would include a media blitz in secular newspapers and the distribution of “a massive amount” of literature.
Agudah, which has strong ties to Israel’s Agudat Yisrael political party as well as other religious parties that influence forces in Israeli politics, plans to meet with leaders of Israel’s government to make its case.
Sherer said the campaign would move forward despite this week’s assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“The debates taking place in Israel have not vanished, but have just been set aside” during the period of mourning, he said.
Meanwhile, the Reform movement remains supportive of the Education Ministry’s new curriculum, which is being developed and is in the process of being implemented, and is moving ahead with its own advocacy campaign.
The first “significant” amount of money – in excess of $100,000 – raised in North America is about to be sent to Israel’s Reform movement to get the grass- roots campaign going, Yoffie said.
“The Orthodox monopoly in Israel has failed,” he declared.
“After a half-century of legally controlling religious life in Israel, when every opportunity existed for them to convey their message, they failed to transmit Judaism to the younger generation as whole.”
At the same time, Yoffie contends that surveys show that “three-quarters of Israelis” support alternatives to Orthodox Judaism.
These alternatives are “beginning to experience a measure of success,” he said.
Among the Reform movement’s major efforts is a legislative initiative to expand marriage ceremony options for Israelis.
“It is a scandal and an outrage that Israel is the only democratic country in the world where substantial numbers of its own citizens are unable to marry,” said Yoffie.
The Orthodox rabbinate has controlled marriage, as well as divorce and burial, since the founding of the State of Israel. Recent steps have been taken to provide alternatives to Orthodox burial.
But with marriages, the law remains as it has been since David Ben-Gurion pledged that marriages in Israel would always be conducted according to the halachic, or traditional Jewish legal, standard. His pledge came in a letter he wrote at the time of the state’s founding to leaders of the Agudath Israel World Leadership Organization, Sherer said.
The Reform movement has drafted a bill that, if passed, would permit civil marriages in Israel. It will be introduced into the Parliament “in the next months by friendly Knesset members,” Yoffie said.
Yoffie declined to reveal the identities of the Knesset members who have pledged to introduce the bill.
More than 100,000 Israelis are unable to marry today, he said. He said some of those are recent immigrants who are not Jewish according to Jewish law, though their fathers were Jewish and they have lived their whole lives “as Jews yearning for Zion.”
Others are prohibited from marrying because they cannot prove their Jewishness.
“Ample numbers have been told they need to provide a photograph of their grandmother’s tombstone in Russia with a Russia with a Jewish name on it” and no picture is available, he said.
One couple barred from marrying in Israel will be wed at the upcoming convention of the UAHC, to be held in Atlanta at the end of this month.
Although both partners are Jewish, the couple cannot marry in Israel because he is a Kohen, descended from the priestly line, and she is divorced. Their union is forbidden by the Orthodox understanding of Jewish law.
Shimon Shetreet, Israel’s minister of religious affairs, has proposed that the government help such couples arrange civil marriages abroad. These would then would be recognized officially in Israel.
Meanwhile, other Orthodox groups in the United States have been working to defeat the liberal denominations’ efforts to bring religious pluralism to Israel.
When the Reform movement groups tried to introduce a resolution endorsing religious pluralism in Israel at the annual meeting of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council two years ago, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the umbrella group’s one Orthodox member, threatened to pull out.
A similar situation occurred at the American Zionist Movement’s convention in January, when the group’s several Orthodox member groups did pull out after a majority of the delegates approved a resolution, introduced by the Reform movement, endorsing religious pluralism in Israel.
After tense negotiations surrounding the NJCRAC dispute, the Orthodox Union and the liberal religious groups reached a compromise.
Under the agreement, the Reform movement would withdraw its resolution and the NJCRAC would facilitate a forum at which representatives of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform movements in Israel would present their perspectives on religious pluralism to NJCRAC members.
That forum took place in October, but the situation remains precarious.
The Orthodox Union is leaving open the possibility of withdrawing from the Jewish community’s central umbrella organization over the issue, said Rabbi Rafael Butler, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union.
“How to address the pluralism issue is one of the great challenges of the day,” he said.
“The challenge for the spiritual soul of the Jewish people will ultimately be focused in Israel as well,” he said, adding that he is interested in learning more about the Agudah’s efforts.
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