Religious Split Grows Between Jews in Israel

JERUSALEM —  His Conservative Jewish adherents have been branded “terrorists,” “Nazis” and “Christians.”

Rabbi Ehud Bandel doesn’t mince words either: It’s a hot summer in Israel, he says, and it presages an even hotter fall.

Israeli police forced Bandel and about 200 other Conservative Jewish men and women away from the Western Wall earlier this week after they began praying together, provoking an angry response from hundreds of Orthodox Jews. The Conservatives, some weeping, were forced to leave the area, jeered by scores of ultra-Orthodox, whose practice forbids women to pray with men.

The confrontation, which pitted Jew against Jew in the shadow of one of Judaism’s holiest shrines, came as thousands gathered to mark Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the first and second Jewish temples.

“On this day of all days, it was a lesson in hatred without a rightful cause,” Bandel said, citing a traditional account that internal discord caused the destruction.

But Orthodox leaders accused the Conservatives of provocation. “They came there to tease the religious,” said Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, a lawmaker from the United Torah Judaism Party. “Did they think the wall was a nightclub where men and women had to be together?”

The incident was yet another indication that a divisive debate between Orthodox Jews and members of Judaism’s more liberal movements is heating up. A committee formed last June to find a compromise on the issue of Jewish conversions is reportedly in danger of falling apart. And new controversy rages over the appointment of a Reform Jew--the first--to a municipal religious council in Israel.

At the heart of the battle is whether the Orthodox establishment will continue to hold a monopoly over Jewish conversions in Israel, which allows them to define who is a Jew and determine which converts qualify for Israeli citizenship. Another factor, however, is an increasingly determined struggle by Reform and Conservative leaders here to gain official recognition for their movements. The two groups are relatively small in Israel but represent the majority of American Jews.

“The larger picture behind all of this is whether the state of Israel is going to recognize only one branch of Judaism as the legitimate expression of Jewish tradition” said Rabbi Uri Regev, a leader of the Reform movement in Israel. “Or is the state going to be open to all Jewish thought and practice?”

Tensions have risen over the religious issues since last year, when Orthodox political parties made an unprecedented showing in national elections and formed a critical bloc in the ruling coalition. Since then, they have used their political clout to promote a bill that would formalize an existing status quo, giving Orthodox rabbis sole authority to perform conversions in Israel.

In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached an agreement with Reform and Conservative leaders to work out a compromise on the bill by the end of the year. But last week, the committee working to resolve the dispute was bogged down.

Reform and Conservative leaders said they feared that a failure to reach a compromise would lead to the revival of the conversion bill.

But the modern movements have scored a number of recent legal victories, including an Israeli Supreme Court decision last week that Joyce Rosman Brenner, a Reform Jew, should be allowed to serve on the religious council in the city of Netanya. The ruling outraged Orthodox Jews.

Local religious councils oversee various religious services, including the operation of synagogues and the certification of kosher food.

Ravitz said the attempt by Brenner and her backers, including the far left Meretz Party, to win a place on the Netanya council is aimed at “trying to change our Jewish identity.”

“They believe that Judaism is not a religion with absolute ideas,” Ravitz said. “They say it should be like the Protestants, which allows all different ideas.”

Brenner agrees--in part. Her aim, she says, is to offer people a choice, a pluralistic society in which various approaches to Judaism are tolerated. “Reform and Conservative Jews are also concerned about religious issues,” she said. “We should have the right to express our Judaism in our own ways.”