Attention all converts: Your conversions are all subject to reversal. Your children may not be Jewish. You may have to pull your children out of religious schools. And if you are married to Jews you may have to get divorced. If you are a man be prepared to say goodbye to your wife and children. But don't worry. If you are a woman, you can take your little Shkotzim with you!
I want to throw up!
This is the latest volley fired at converts by an increasingly intolerant Israeli Chief Rabbinate. They have apparently announced that ALL conversions are subject to reversal. No Ger is safe. From Ha'artez:
A precedent-setting statement this week by the Chief Rabbinate, which said all conversions may be retroactively annulled at any time.
This goes far beyond anything they have done till now. It is one thing to accuse a specific Beis Din or Rav of improper procedures. Honest men can differ about that. Converts of this court may be in question but at least it is limited to a specific situation. To say that all conversions are subject to reversal has no precedent in Halacha. The only thing such statements do is cast every single Ger Tzedek into turmoil. The kind of turmoil the Torah expressly forbids!
Rivkah Lubitch is a Rabbinic Court advocate from the Center for Women's Justice. I don’t know what her religious status is. She may be the world’s biggest left wing feminist or she may be the most Charedi woman in the world. She may even be totally secular. But I completely agree with her. These are her words:
"This is an immoral, inhumane and anti-Halakhic assertion,"
I don’t know what has happened to the Chief Rabbinate. But I do know that Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar was "furious" about this document.
I can only surmise that the Charedi takeover of the Chief rabbinate is behind this. The takeover is complete. And it is sickening. I’m not sure what can be done to stop these people from their outrageous actions. But in my view the Israeli Rabbinate ought to be disbanded by the government of Israel. They ought to stop funding it now. I don’t care what good it has done in the past or what good it does now. It has crossed a line that violates basic Torah law… and it is causing untold pain to thousands of people. All in the guise of preserving the holiness of the Jewish people. They are succeeding in paving the road to hell.
Whatever the Rabbinate does that is deemed vital to the State or its citizens – like establishing national Kashrus standards or supervisions should be channeled into other institutions. Or let there be a new independent Kashrus authority created. Rabbis in various communities should be retained but independent of the Chief Rabbinate. Perhaps a new agency should be set up to maintain standards for their service. The same thing is true for any other vital activity currently under their jurisdiction. The people running the show there now are incompetent! They have to be stopped!
