Identity Problems Plague Israel

Last month more than sixty religion editors and writers went on a ten-day fact-finding tour of Israel sponsored by the Associated Church Press, the Catholic Press Association, the Religious Newswriters Association, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. News Editor Russell Chandler reports here and on pages 14 and 15.

The young little nation of Israel—devoting the major share of its political attention and its tax revenue to security and defense problems—was embroiled in a semi-war this month. But a domestic issue threatened to steal the thunder from the Syrian jet that roared over Haifa, shattering dozens of windowpanes.

It was the stormy debate over “who’s a Jew,” exciting Israelis as few issues in recent times have done.

About 3,000 demonstrators carrying placards with messages like “Golda, you are not Joan of Arc” protested outside the Knesset (parliament) over Premier Golda Meir’s handling of the issue. In another volatile episode inside the Knesset a few days before, an opposition member was hustled out of his seat by ushers. He refused to quiet down in a debate of a controversial government bill that would give the force of law to the traditional religious criteria of deciding Jewishness.

Another representative of the opposition faction was suspended for five sessions of the Knesset for tearing up his government identity card on the rostrum to demonstrate his defiance of the bill.

It was the filling out of the identity card, in fact, that touched off the present controversy—a question far from settled.

Benny and Anne Shalit, self-declared atheists, had been fighting since 1967 to have their children registered as of “no religion” but of “Jewish peoplehood” (Le’om). To them, there is a clear distinction between belonging to a people and one’s personal religion. The concept is vehemently opposed by Orthodox rabbis.

In an unprecendented 5–4 ruling last month, the Israel Supreme Court held that a man can be of Jewish nationality without being of Jewish faith. In effect, it said that the Ministry of Interior must register any applicant according to his own definition of what it means to be a Jew.

Reaction was swift and strong. Some Israeli officials said the decision would split the nation; religious leaders almost unanimously condemned the ruling, holding that only the rabbinate—through the Halachic law—may decide, for religious purposes, who is a Jew.

During the Sabbath reading at Heichal Shlomo, Jerusalem’s leading synagogue, Dr. Moshe Yafe rapped on the altar and invoked a rare religious custom that allows a worshiper to interrupt reading of the weekly chapter of the Talmud on grounds that a wrong has been done to him. Yafe, president of the Union of Synagogues of Israel, declared that he was making a complaint not on his own behalf but for a large majority of Jews in Israel opposing the Shalit ruling.

Explaining the thorny issue to a group of American newsmen, Dr. Yehuda Bloom, a Hebrew University law professor, said the criterion was not biological but “a question of national and spiritual identity.” Bloom said he feared repercussions in other Jewish communities, particularly the United States.

“There are very grave dangers in the long-range view,” he said. “It invites the severance of nationality from religion, thereby encouraging mixed marriages.” Such marriages, in his view, usually result in the loss of the Jewish partner’s religious and ethnic identity.

Prompted by mounting public opposition to the Supreme Court decision, the Israeli cabinet decided to change the law to conform with the Halachic definition of Jewishness the Interior Ministry had been using through decree. A compromise formula was devised for approval by the coalition government at mid-month.

Basically, it would re-enforce the traditional definition of a Jew as anyone born of a Jewish mother or a convert to the faith (Mrs. Shalit isn’t Jewish). But the burden of proof of any applicants’s Jewish identity would be on the registration clerk—not the applicant.

The government bill does not upset the court’s ruling on the Shalit case: Oren, 5, and Galya, 2, have been officially notified of their unique status as the only people in Israel to be known as Jews by nationality—but not by religion.

The Jewish Law of Return provides that any Jew may immigrate to Israel and, upon entrance, acquire Israeli citizenship. According to the compromise package, the Law of Return would be modified to a more liberal interpretation. Both partners in a mixed marriage, as well as their children, would be permitted to return to Israel and obtain citizenship and other benefits.

A cabinet amendment extended these privileges to an extra generation: the children’s spouses and children would also be covered.In order to marry, however, immigrants will still have to prove accredited Orthodox parentage, or convert to Orthodox Judaism according to Halachic standards. There is no civil marriage under Israeli law, and all non-Orthodox Jews must be married outside the country.

As the wave of strong feeling on the “who’s a Jew” question showed no signs of quickly subsiding, two points seemed to be emerging:

• If the government bill and its amendments are accepted, it will ultimately mean a slight shrinkage in the dimensions of civil liberty for Israelis. Responsibility for meeting the problems of Jewish identity will be placed less in the hands of the government and more in the hands of the rabbis.

• At the same time, it will bring a degree of Halachic flexibility. Rabbinic authorities will be faced with the need to liberalize conversion procedures if they are to prevent the erosion of Jewish identity they deplore.

Eschatological Stirrings: Madman At The Mosque?

Most people in Israel think Denis Michael Rohan, 28, the Australian sheep-herder who set fire to Jerusalem’s Al Aksa Mosque last August 21, is a tormented religious bigot. The medical director of the mental hospital where Rohan is indefinitely confined told CHRISTIANITY TODAY: “Certainly he is insane and psychotic.”

But an Orthodox Jew, a successful lawyer who holds a doctorate in jurisprudence from Harvard University, thinks Rohan may be of sound mind “and the rest of us insane.” Reuben Gross, who with his family immigrated to Jerusalem from the United States in 1967, set forth his views in the Jerusalem Post recently. It was weeks before the paper decided to print the story, Gross said in an interview.

Finally, when it did, most reaction was critical. “I thought they were going to send the men in little white coats after me,” Gross confided. Privately, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and a noted Jerusalem rabbi indicated agreement with Gross.

According to Gross, the fate of the Temple Mount, where the gleaming silver-domed Al Aksa Mosque (second only to Mecca and Medina in sacredness to the Muslim) stands, still not fully repaired, “is one of the most under-discussed topics in this overarticulate age.”

Rohan, apparently fired by reading material from the Pasadena, California, Herbert W. Armstrong Church of God (see November 7, 1969, issue, page 54), testified at his two-week trial that he had been chosen by God to build a temple to Jesus on the site of the Hebrew Temple. That temple was destroyed by the Roman invasion in A.D. 70; Al Aksa was built in the eighth century. It is steps away from the Western, or Wailing, Wall.

Before building a temple of his own, of course, Rohan had to destroy the mosque. The action set off a wave of anti-Israel feeling throughout the Muslim world and led to the pan-Islamic conference in Rabat, Morocco. The meeting was called to capitalize on anti-Israel feeling generated in Muslim countries not directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Even the Six Day War [in 19671 did not give rise to an assemblage of Muslims from all over the world,” Gross noted. The amount of damage to the mosque (less than $100,000) didn’t warrant such a stir. “It is the eschatological implication of Israel and a unified Jerusalem that has shaken them,” Gross says.

“But because theological terms are not the currency of discourse in the modern world, thinking on this level has been forced into subterranean channels. As long as the Old City was in Jordanian hands, the ancient dream of a rebuilt temple could conveniently be left in the category of dreams. But with the union of all Jerusalem under Jewish control, the dream assumed realistic outlines, and the challenge to rebuild the temple, with its host of difficult political and religious questions, loomed large.”

Religious Jews have made no attempt to rebuild the temple in recent times. For one thing, the Temple Mount’s state of ritual uncleanness to Orthodox Jews has made it off limits to them. Many rabbis say the time is not yet: there will be a “sign from heaven,” the coming of the messiah, before the rebuilding can commence.

But Gross, a thoughtful man who fought in the Jewish war of independence and until recently was chairman of the American Veterans of Israel, believes that the biggest factor in the Rohan uproar is Israel’s psychological unpreparedness to rebuild the temple: “Jewry is embarrassed by a rendezvous with a destiny for which it is ill prepared.”

“Regardless of how we rationalize our perplexity,” continued Gross, “a Zionist State without Zion is a schizoid thing.… By contrast Michael Rohan is a model of sanity.”

Gross does not excuse Rohan’s act of arson, but he contends it was not based on an insane intention. Rather, it followed logically from Rohan’s bona fide—albeit mistaken—belief that God had commissioned him to be king over Jerusalem and Judea.The court said Rohan was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was not punishable for his deed because he had acted under an uncontrollable pathological impulse.

To Reuben Gross, the point is not Rohan’s guilt. “That an Israeli court might degrade his intentions in the sight of the walls of Jerusalem will never be forgotten,” he wrote in the Post. “The Jerusalem which our forefathers swore not to forget was not a city sans temple.”

Musing as to why a member of a Christian sect (and a tourist to Jerusalem at that) should have taken the first step toward a new temple, Gross conjectured: “Eschatological stirrings are touching Christians more than we Jews.… The Gentile thinks simple and straight. You need childlike simplicity to grasp it.… We Jews have absorbed so much of the poisons of exile, we have refused to take our own history seriously.”

Bible Misuse

“Where have the churches been on the issue of peace in the Middle East?” asked a disgruntled Israeli official at a press conference in Jerusalem last month. Speaking to about sixty U. S. religion editors and writers, he went on to issue a pointed attack on the World Council of Churches’ “attitude toward Israel” and added that Israelis have “great misgivings” about recent WCC statements.

The government panelist was referring to an eight-point statement adopted by the WCC in Canterbury, England, last August. In the eyes of most Israelis, it takes a decided pro-Arab and pro-Russian stand. Particularly objectionable is a statement concerning a call for restudying biblical interpretation in order to “avoid the misuse of the Bible in support of partisan views and to clarify the bearing of faith upon critical political questions.”

After an extended visit to Israel, Dr. Arnold T. Olson of Minneapolis, president of the Evangelical Free Church of America and the National Association of Evangelicals, concluded: “The Israelis have taken this to mean that the World Council of Churches will now study the Bible to find out what right Israel has to use the scriptures in defending the rebirth of the state.”

The official reply to the WCC draft came from Professor I. J. Werblowsky, professor of comparative religion at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “The World Council statement is a retrograde step, putting the block back in a manner that may well undermine any possibility of a continuing Jewish-Christian dialogue,” he said. “To my knowledge the WCC has so far not officially recommended the study of biblical interpretation in order to avoid the Catholic misuse of Scripture.… To come out with a bland statement about the possibilities of the Bible in support of partisan political views is to my mind the most decisive and incontrovertible testimony to a basically un-ecumenical frame of mind.”

Kenneth R. Zebell, the WCC’s man on refugee work in Jerusalem, told reporters that the WCC statement was “no embarrassment” to him, and that it had not hindered his relations with the Israel State Department.

Meanwhile, two American religious journals issued a joint editorial last month—thought to be the first action of its kind—excoriating abuse of Scripture for partisan purposes by both religious and political leaders in the Middle East.

“We are convinced that [all parties] … could help defuse the present crisis by categorically rejecting the use of the Bible for propaganda means,” wrote the Reverend J. Martin Bailey in the United Church Herald, the United Church of Christ national magazine, and the Reverend Charles Angell, editor of the Lamp, a Roman Catholic unity journal. Such use of Scripture “ignores the circumstances in which the Bible was written and the purposes of its original writers,” the editors said.

Lebanon’S Shattered Peace

During the past few weeks, Lebanon’s uneasy peace has repeatedly been shattered by dynamite blasts in the capital city of Beirut. Now a new element seems to have been added: for the first time some blasts apparently were directed at Lebanon’s Jewish population.

Almost all Lebanese Jews (about 3,000) live in Wadi Abu Jmil, Beirut’s Jewish sector, an area under police surveillance since the June, 1967, war with Israel. On January 18 a dynamite blast caused minor damage to the Jewish Religious Council’s Alliance school in the Wadi Abu Jmil quarter. Shortly over a week later, an explosion in an empty lot rocked the area but caused no damage.

Lebanese government officials said the explosion was “aimed at creating an atmosphere of anxiety” and probably was “the work of a hired treacherous hand to distort the reputation of Lebanon.” The Palestinian commando organization Fatah denounced the incident, warning Arab and Palestinian peoples to guard against “imperialist and Zionist plots which aim at terrorizing Arab Jews to emigrate to Palestine and become, against their will, soldiers in the army of the enemy and help for its sectarian aggressive state.”

Workers among the Jews in Lebanon tend to think the recent blasts were not aimed exclusively at the Jewish community, but were designed to create disturbances among all groups. A Christian worker said the Jews in Lebanon are very close to the Christian community and during the 1967 war were advised to seek protection in Christian villages.

LILLIAN HARRIS DEAN

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.