"Am I still Jewish?!" - personal consequences of mass rejection of conversions

Posted by: Treifalicious | May 03, 2008 at 02:10 AM Done. This decision ensures that I will NEVER return to Israel to live. They probably will revoke my citizenship anyway. As someone who converted through the Beit Din L'Giur in 1999 I am one of those people whose conversion stands to be revoked.(how else could I have converted in Israel? I asked how I can convert to Judaism, they pointed me in the direction of Ulpan Giur. Something like 2000 - 3000 people converted in these Rabbinate-sponsored conversion classes every year. . That's between 18,000 and 27,000 people - marriages annulled, children suddenly not Jewish, people then also losing citizenship and having to leave the country. 18-27,000 lives turned completely upside down) It hasn't really sunk in yet. As someone who sat through these classes in some ways they were a joke - many people were NOT sincere at all. One couple with a guy from South America converting actually put up a CHRISTMAS TREE and drove regularly on Shabbat. I would see women in my class during the day in shorts and tank tops and then later that same day see them in class with long skirts and long sleeved shirts. And these were not people like many of the Russians who treated the whole thing with naked, utter and total contempt. I felt like such a frier for actually overhauling my wardrobe and wearing the long skirts all day every day, keeping kosher and keeping Shabbat. Later on, when asked about conversion by others, I would say, "If you really want to be Jewish you will wear the long skirts and at least try to keep kashrut and Shabbat." I encouraged Orthodox conversion, discouraged Reform conversion and still do to this day. But afterwards, you cannot police people for the rest of their lives. To do so would turn the State of Israel into a fascist police state. Sure, first they have religious police to look after converts, but then they will start policing the general public, making Israel like Saudi Arabia and Iran which DO have religious police (for an idea of how people deal with religious police, see the movie Persopolis and see what happens after the Ayatollah Khomeini takes over. Basically, everyone starts leading double lives. The whole thing becomes a pointless cat-and-mouse-game). In the Jerusalem Post in one of the talkbacks there was one guy who said he would gladly go back to Christianity and wants his foreskin back. I cannot say the same. I can never go back to being a Christian. I had lived as a Jew for some SIX YEARS before I had even started the conversion class. I did not need the class in order to pass the oral exam before the Beit Din. What about the people, like my roommate, myself and others who really were sincere? What if someone was no so into it at first but then became very observant afterwards? Jewish religious observance is fluid over the course of one's life. The only real way to do this would be to go back over every single conversion, all 18-27,000 of them and do some sort of KGB like detective work to try to figure out if they were sincere at the time. But they don't want to do that because they are ultimately a bunch of lazy bureaucrats and prefer to just invalidate every conversion done in Israel over the past 9 years, upending thousands of lives. These rabbis will find themselves in the dustbin of history like the Sadducees in the not so distant future. But in the meantime, if I am not Jewish anymore, who am I?