An expanded nine justice panel of the High Court of Justice ruled on Monday to recognize conversions by the Reform and Masorti (Conservative) movements in Israel for the purposes of citizenship, ending a 15-year legal saga.
The decision set off a firestorm of criticism from Orthodox
political parties who vowed to pass legislation to overturn the ruling
and threatened not to enter any coalition without promises to do so,
while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party also denounced the ruling.
You know, back in the heydays of the Jewish blogsphere you'd get the occasional story about some non-religious couple coming to Israel to get married and getting raked over the coals by the Rabbanut to prove their Jewishness. And now you know why.
ReplyDeleteThis had always been a point of hypocrisy and a moral blind spot for the Reformatives. They want to change standards, to violate halakha but you still have to consider what they do just as Jewish as what we do.
So all this ruling means is that (a) a lot of non-religious Jews will get jobs at the Rabbanut as the real rabbonim refuse to do weddings for these faux-converts (b) good families will double-down on yichus checks.