Want to Get Married? First Prove You're Jewish

I knew some people with this problem. They did fine - because of a CHABAD involvement. The Chabad rabbi personally knew the couple, or their family, and vouched for their being Jews. His letter stating this on Chabad stationery was faxed to Israel, and all was well. No, it did not cost money. Obviously, eventually, any involvement with anything costs at least some money. But there is no admission price at Chabad.

It's not just a problem with Jews marrying other Jews of questionable documentation. The law itself is wrong. Jews and Muslims should not be prevented from marrying by state laws, nor should Jews and Christians. But from Israel there's a steady stream of intermarriage couples getting married elsewhere, such as in Cyprus, in some cases moving elsewhere permanently, because the law of Israel and prejudice in the society makes it impossible for them to be legally married, or to live free of fear.

Here, as in other areas, my position is that all consenting adult humans should be equally free to marry the consenting adult humans whom they love and will commit to responsibly partner with, and to have their marriages recognized equally by the society they live in.

I believe that's not the position of Chabad, incidentally. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

My mother's family has been members of Conservative shuls since the fifties, and so we are no longer Jewish in the eyes of the Israeli rabbinate. No matter that we keep kosher (though not as kosher as it could be), try to go to shul on shabbat and the holidays (but the wrong kind of shul) and send our kids to Jewish day schools (but not the right kind of school).

Meanwhile, my husbands parents, who were married by the rabbinate in Israel in the 70s, are completely secular, yet now count as "bona fide" Jews. My husband had never been to Rosh Hashana services until he met me - not that I am criticising my in-laws, who, needless to say, have a lot of yiddishkeit. So I suppose by marrying a goy like me, he screwed up the bloodline.

My fiance, whom I met on Jdate, who was raised Jewish in Jewish schools, and who had a Bar Mitzvah, is "not Jewish," because even though we know who his daddy is (and his paternal Grandmother, tyvm), his mom was raised Catholic and never converted.  Makes a lot of sense.

Sharon mg, what??? Somebody who is born a Jew cannot cease to be one. Ask anybody. Ask Chabad, for instance. You will get an earful. You, a goy?? Anyway you are OT. This thread is about Jews, whose families are light on documentation, particularly ketubahs, which is lots of us, who want, for obvious reasons, to marry in Israel. I mentioned that Chabad can help with that. As there is a Chabad on every streetcorner, that was very helpful of me.

...if a b'rit ahuvim would suffice.  not that i can find one anywhere...  some artsy jew should create a line of pretty, frame-worthy, ketubah-esque lover's covenants. 

"I REALLY LIKE you but we not exactly MARRIED or anything" slightly-ketubahs. That won't work. Save your money. (Did you think the artsy Jew would work for free?) It is easier to play it straight. This is creating additional complications. Why do we seem to crave complications? Maybe we don't have enough children. Maybe we don't study enough Talmud. Anybody who is not ready for children should at least be breaking brains over the Talmud. Call 1-800-STUDY 4-2 for a phone-study partner -  free. They connect women to women, and men to men, at ANY level, including complete, utter beginner, to advanced. Free.

Huh?

Ouch, Helen Jupiter, you have a tough scene. If his Dad could marry a Catholic, which was rebelling, maybe he can rebel too, and have an Orthodox conversion. His Mom was rebelling, too. Why shouldn't two rebels produce a rebel? Rebellion should come back into style. Everybody is too nice.

Poof.

Two rebels, two negatives, indeed make a positive -  their opposite, a loyalist. An Orthodox returnee. Make a Torah-faithful home. They will like your cooking. They will adjust to your odd ways. They will come to respect your integrity and commitment. And your ketubah will have gold leaf on it. You will look cute in the candle-light, and you will get to hear "Ashet Chayil" every single week, done right. As for the mikvah, men have to go too, it's not about women being impure. The water is warm and clean. I know. I have been.

Next the Rabbinate will be asking to see all of our bedika cloths to make sure our children aren't b'nai niddah.

How far is this going to go?

 

That's like saying we just found out that this hot dog isn't kosher, even though it came from a really Jewish part of Brooklyn, and I bought it at a Jewish deli, and most of the ingredients (onions, spices, filler) are all kosher, just because it's also made of pork.

The laws are in the torah.  Either follow them or don't (that's up to you), but just because something doesn't make sense as written, it doesn't make it less a law.  I could pull any guy off the street and sign him up for 25 years of Jewish education and give him a JDate account.  Doesn't make him Jewish.  Feel free to blame the rabbi who held a bar mitzvah ceremony for the guy despite his not yet being a MOT. Or the Reform movement in general.  But blaming the Orthodox (and Conservative) movements for saying the Torah definition of a Jew is the only benchmark is pretty shortsighted.

A lot of torah laws don't make sense. Add ritual conversion to the list.  It's certainly as important as kashrut. 

Lena - I think you and I are talking about two separate issues.  This article has less to do with religion and more to do with a specific policy currently in place in Israel.  What is troubling here are the discrepancies and double standards within Israeli governmental policy. 

For instance, Sharon's mother was Jewish enough to be granted Israeli citizenship by the Law of Return, but she wasn't Jewish enough for her daughter to be able to prove her Jewish heritage to the members of the Israeli rabbinate.  The conclusion that is drawn from this kind of discrepancy is that the rabbinate has changed its standards over time.  Unless I am mistaken, it does not say in the Torah, "in the 1960s, one policy will be considered halachicly acceptable, but that policy will be substituted for a stricter one 40 years later." 

Similarly, the New York Times article states that the Israeli rabbinate is often skeptical of Jews that grew up in American Orthodox communities, considering American Orthodoxy a lesser form of what they themselves preach.  Therefore, even Orthodox Americans are at risk for being affected by this policy. So regardless of how one personally feels about pluralism and the legitimacy and authority of the Reform and Conservative movements, it can be said that something is troubling about the state of Israeli marriage rights.

Theocracy is bad.  That's really the whole argument.  But if you want the long version:

Restricting the right to get married - or any other right - to members of a certain religion - to certain members of a certain religion - is theocracy, and creates a second class of citizenry in the state of Israel.  Thus, apparently at least some citizens of the state of Israel have learned the wrong lesson from centuries of persecution. Rather than learning the lesson of humanism - that all people are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, etc. - they have apparently learned (in part, of course, only in part) that the best way to deal with persecution is to become the persecutor, a la The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Anyway, making law on the basis of religious affiliation is simple theocracy, and theocracy is bad.  If you disagree, please go live under the Taliban for a while - because the thing about theocracy is, it usually devolves into fascism, and you only very occasionally get lucky and live under a theocracy that actually agrees with your values exactly.  If you yourself are not willing to live under the Taliban, why do you want to make other people live under a theocracy not of their choosing?

orthodox conversions in the torah?

See  The SY Empire.

The position is hardly unreasonable because religious practice among Ashkenazim has declined strongly since the 1840s-50s.

In general the boundaries between Eastern European Jews and neighboring non-Jewish populations were far less distinct than traditionalists depict.

War as well as social and economic breakdown in German (and Czech) territories from the early seventeenth through later eighteenth century lead to the creation of a large displaced class of people, who simply did not know their religious origins and who passed either into the Jewish or non-Jewish populations.

In Poland Polish aristocrats not infrequently had Jewish mistresses, whose children often became members of the Jewish community, while in Czarist and Soviet Russia children of Jewish men and non-Jewish women were often treated as Jews by the governemt, and many people of such mixed heritage passed into the Jewish community.