The two week-old protest demonstration by several hundred Ethiopian immigrants outside Chief Rabbinate headquarters here continued Wednesday despite entreaties to end it.
The immigrants, encamped in an open area directly opposite the Great Synagogue and the Hechel Shlomo, say they will not budge until the Chief Rabbinate recognizes them as Jews with no strings attached and drops its demand that they undergo ritual immersion, a religious conversion rite, before they are allowed to marry.
The two Chief Rabbis, Mordechai Eliahu (Sephardic) and Avraham Shapiro (Ashkenazic), are equally adamant. They claim their requirement is minimal and necessary to remove doubts about the personal status of Ethiopian Jews under halacha, religious law. To the Ethiopians, this casts an aspersion on their authenticity as Jews and is an intolerable insult to a community which endured the severest hardships to maintain their Jewish identity and emigrate to Israel.
COALITION CRISIS LOOMING
Meanwhile, a possible coalition crisis is looming over the efforts by Absorption Minister Yaacov Tzur to settle the dispute. He has warned the Chief Rabbis that unless they come up quickly with a satisfactory response to the Ethiopians, he will raise the matter at Sunday’s Cabinet meeting.
The Knesset faction of the National Religious Party, a member of the unity coalition, met in emergency session to denounce government intervention in matters of halacha and decisions of the Chief Rabbinical Council. They urged NRP leaders to ask Premier Shimon Peres to reprimand Tzur for his involvement in the affair.
They also denounced as incitement the active support given the Ethiopian protestors by such political parties as Mapam, Shinui and the Civil Rights Movement, and by leaders of Reform Judaism. Both Chief Rabbis rejected Tzur’s demand that they reach an early decision. Eliahu called on Peres to discipline the Absorption Minister.
The protestors, most of them men, are spread across the area outside the Chief Rabbinate offices, sitting on cardboard boxes or lying on old blankets. They seek what shade they can find from the few small olive trees that dot the area. Many passersby respond to their requests to sign petitions supporting the cause of the Ethiopian community.
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