A new dispute has arisen between Israel’s civil courts and the chief rabbinate over the determination of who is legally a Jew. A Tel Aviv district court has ruled that the circumcised son of a non-Jewish mother is a Jew on the strength of his mother’s declaration to that effect at the circumcision ceremony.
But Israel’s Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, Isser Untermann, protested that the question of who is a Jew is a matter of Jewish religious law which can be defined only by rabbinical courts. He insisted that under Jewish law a Jew is either one who has been born to a Jewish mother or who has been converted to Judaism.
The court however maintained that civil courts have exclusive jurisdiction over declaratory Judgments as to the religion of a person while the rabbinic courts have the right to deal with the matter only in cases of application for marriage or conversion.
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.
