The chairman of the World Mizrachi-Hapoel Hamizrachi movement lashed out yesterday at the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the US and Canada for an advertisement they published in the Jewish Daily Forward of New York attacking Israel’s National Religious Party for its abstention in the July 12 Knesset vote on the “Who is a Jew?” issue. Rabbi Zemah Zambrowsky, in a statement issued here, denied categorically that Israel’s Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, Isser Yehuda Unterman had issued a ruling to the NRP to vote for the Agudat Israel measure that would have made halachic (religious law) conversions mandatory for prospective immigrants, as the ad claimed. The bill was decisively defeated in the Knesset with only one NRP member voting with its supporters.
The NRP has come under bitter attack from right-wing Orthodox groups in Israel and the US for its abstention. The religious party abstained at the insistence of its coalition partner, Premier Golda Meir’s Labor Alignment, which opposed the Agudat Israel bill.
Rabbi Zambrowsky’s statement noted that the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Nissim and Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, son of the late Chief Rabbi Kook and “other eminent rabbinic scholars urged against voting for the bill,” an act that could have brought down the coalition. Chief Rabbi Unterman, a veteran NRP member for over 50 years, wrote to the NRP in favor of the bill on the eve of the voting but stressed that he was only advising, not issuing a halachic injunction, Rabbi Zambrowsky said.
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