By Ted Belman
The Supreme Court ruling, is narrow in scope: It applies only to Jews who have converted under non-Orthodox auspices within Israel’s borders, which encompasses a small number of people. Still, haredi politicians and leaders have fulminated against it.
Resistance to the ruling dovetails with another hot-button political issue in Israel: the status of African illegal immigrants in Israel, a population of roughly 30,000.
Shas, “thousands of infiltrators and foreign workers will become Jewish through Reform conversion.”
Netanyahu echoed that claim on Tuesday. He suggested that the court decision could allow African illegal immigrants to take advantage of Israel’s Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who applies.
“The real question we have is [how] to prevent fake conversions that could enter the country,”
“You know, a lot of people want to come into Israel. In fact, I put up a fence, they call it a wall, but I prevented the overrunning of Israel, which is the only first-world country that you can walk to from Africa. We would have had here already a million illegal migrants from Africa, and the Jewish state would have collapsed.”
Netanyahu was referring to the construction of a fence several years ago along Israel’s southern border, which essentially stopped an influx of tens of thousands of African illegal immigrants who had arrived in Israel in the preceding years.
On Sunday, Gilad Kariv, a Reform leader running for Israel’s parliament with the Labor Party, wrote on Facebook that “The Conservative and Reform movements in Israel convert only those who have residency status. Not labor migrants. Not asylum seekers. Not tourists.”
But when Harkov asked Netanyahu if he was concerned about the possibility of Africans coming to Israel and converting to gain citizenship, he said, “Not only from there, you can have it from the entire world.”
“We can solve the problem of conversion for all streams and all denominations in Judaism, but we also have to protect the borders of Israel so that we’re not overrun,” he said. “And I think we can find a balance between the two.”
@ Reader:
I was speaking with an ironic meaning. I know perfectly well, as WE ALL do, that it was the Leftist Supreme Court which forbade repatriation or removal to receptive Afrcan countries. I think this is not over yet, but still ongoing. Eventually, with Mazal, they will be cleared out entrely.
@ Edgar G.:
” who for some unknown reason cannot be gotten rid of”
Because can’t means won’t, i.e., someone wants them here?
@ vivarto:
Conversion is about joining the Jewish people and not just adopting the religious beliefs of Jews (which we all know vary greatly). Conversion requires living in a Jewish community for at least a year. Great example:
An American friend of mine who had traveled to Israel and studied Hebrew on a Kibbutz. There he met an Israeli girl and they fell in love. They went back to the USA he converted to Judaism and they married in the USA.
They moved back to Israel he studied more Hebrew and then they moved to a different kibbutz. He joined the IDF and they had children. He was a convert who was living with Jews as a Jew in the Jewish state. I knew him for about a year in Israel when he revealed to me that he was a convert. He knew like most converts, I have met, an enormous amount about Judaism. The converts I have met are very serious and undertake a great amount of study and effort to become Jewish.
The idea that someone can become a member of a nation just by adopting a belief system and a mythology is absurd.
I cannot become Japanese by adopting Shinto.
I won’t become Russian by converting and joining to Russian Orthodox Church.
I will not become a Tibetan by converting to Tibetan Buddhism,
Nor will I become English by signing up for the Anglican church.
I am and will remain a freaking Jew, because my father and my mother were Jewish.
And their respective fathers and mothers were Jewish, and the fathers and mothers of my grandparents were Jewish, and so whole the way back to Abraham.
Now there is such a thing as naturalization. If a person adopts the values, the history, the language, and the very national identity of another nation, he may be accepted as a new member of that nation.
In the bible there is a rule that Moabites who have lived in Israel and have been good citizens for 3 generations can be accepted as Jewish.
For Egyptians this takes 7 generations.
So yea, we could have rules like this.
And someone who fought in the war for the Jewish state, could shorten the wait by one generation.
But converting is stupid.
Africans could as well convert to Orthodox Judaism.
And then what are we going to do with 100 million African, Afghans, and god knows whom who converted to Orthodox Judaism?
The court ruling applies only to converts made in Israel. The Africans are ALREADY here, illegals, 30,000,of them who for some unknown reason cannot be gotten rid of. So they are the only ones to think about and because of the reign of terror they cause, in Sth Tel Aviv, no sane woman will marry any of them….I hope. Of course there are a few quite insane Israeli women who would jump at anything in trousers, and it is they who’ll cause any problems, which, however, should not be. great
With Israel’s relationship to Africa being very good, why is it that we never hear of these illegals going back, either through inducement or otherwise??.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
“Reform Judaism has historically opposed Zionism and advocated that Judaism be considered only a relifgion, not a nationality.” [You mean ethnic origin].
Substitute “Reform” here with “most of the Orthodox” and the statement will remain perfectly true.
Curious, isn’t it?
Could someone enlighten me – I might have been asleep or have gotten otherwise distracted when Hizballah announced that they are removing all those 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel?
Because if the rockets are still there, in addition to all the other problems Israel is facing – why should fake or any other converts flood Israel any time soon unless they are kamikazes or otherwise have a death wish?
And, to reiterate (sorry) from my posts elsewhere, if they are willing to convert and come to Israel to die with us – maybe they are NOT really fake converts?
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Adam, they could have already done if that was there motivation and did not, flood Israel with people opposed to Israel. In fact those who are not Orthodox and move to Israel from North America are true Zionists and they or their children serve in the IDF.
Reformed and Conservative Conversations done outside of Israel have been accepted in Israel for decades. The Supreme Court Ruling applies only to the conversions done inside of Israel, now which currently is an insignificant number of people.
Reform Judaism has historically opposed Zionism and advocated that Judaism be considered only a relifgion, not a nationality. Although they backed off from this position slightly during Israel’s war of independence, they have now largely reverted to it. Their political position is anti-Israel and pro-PLO, and of course pro-Biden and anti-Trump.
Reform now condones interfaith marriage, and Reform rabbis are willing to marry interfaith couples. Something like 70 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews now intermarry. The Reform movement allows non-Jewish spouses to join its congregations on an equal footing with their Jewish spouses. This tends to erode the ethnic element in the Jewish people, and even the whole idea that there is a Jewish people.
The real danger from Reform Judaism comes less from Africa than from the United States. The Reform movement can now flood Israel with non-Jewish leftists who have made an an insincere conversion to Judaism and enable them to quickly acquire Israeli citizenship. These people will stay in Israel only long enough to vote leftists into the Knesset, and then return to their actual permanent homes in the U.S. They will reappear in Israel for a few months every time a new election is being held. The left will acquire a stranglehold on power.
What a bunch of fear mongering and a red herring.
Right now about 40 to 50 approximately people get converted per year under Reform or Conservative Rabbis counsel.
If Israel is overrun by Africans, they will be joining Europe and, under Biden, the US. This could be a new twist on the “Out of Africa” theory, under which our African ancestors invaded and replaced Eurasia’s Neanderthals.