Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana continues on his path to shake up the religious status quo in Israel, in opposition to the Chief Rabbis, and the next item on his agenda is giyur reform, Kan News reported on Wednesday.
Kahana intends to implement similar changes to the giyur process that he developed for kashrus, to allow municipal Rabbanim to perform giyur without the supervision of the Rabbanut. This change was demanded by Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose Russian constituency is comprised of many non-Jewish olim.
According to the report, the reforms are already at an advanced stage of preparation and it’s possible the new system will be presented to the public in a matter of weeks.
Kahana’s advisor, Rabbi Shai Weizman, told Reshet Bet on Wednesday: “[The giyur reforms] are on the agenda. According to the coalition agreements, municipal Rabbanim will perform giyur without the supervision of the Rabbanut. The Prime Minister’s Office is in charge of the process but all relevant parties are already working on the move.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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8 Responses
Badatz Eidah Chareidus is not supervised by Rabbanut, neither are any of the chassidim. I am not sure why everyone needs to be supervised by anyone.
Good. The blood and the tears of the thousands of gerim from overseas whom the Rabbanut has tortured and harassed and made miserable without any excuse, against an explicit ISSUR DE’ORAITA, cry out to Hashem from the ground, and now maybe there will be a measure of justice.
Who the **** gave the Rabbanut the right to put itself in charge of all giyurim in the world? Where did it get the massive chutzpah to do such a thing? What makes anyone think that a city rav is incapable of doing a giyur, or that his giyur is any less reliable than one done by the Rabbanut? What makes anyone think that a rav who doesn’t appear on the Rabbanut’s secret and completely arbitrary list is any less capable than one who appears on it?
Someone who has been validly converted, by ANYONE, is a Jew, and you are not permitted to treat him like a goy. If you’re not sure whether the conversion was valid, it’s your duty to find out; you have no right to take the easy way by assuming without evidence that it was invalid. When it comes to a chicken and you don’t know the shochet, you are entitled to treat it as if it were treif. Nobody is forcing you to eat it just because it’s kosher. But treating a Jew as if he were a goy is an issur de’oraisa, just like eating treif. If you have a genuine safek, you have to be machmir on BOTH sides; don’t marry him, but treat him like a Jew. Make sure you are not hurting his feelings. Be honest with him. And work with him to resolve the situation, without forcing him to demean himself by doing another giyur “lechumra”.
james and milhouse must be as clueless as they sound
Reform is not Judaism.
@Millhouse; “Someone who has been validly converted…” this is the key: local city Rabbanim, however much they know or think they know of Shulchan Aruch, Giyur is a highly complex issue. It’s very much a detective job to determine whether the applicant is genuinely willing and able to keep ALL Torah commandments, positive and prohibitions. For this you need a highly experienced Beth Din who will not give in to any threats and blackmails.
A massive advertising campaign should be launched to warn potentials, that if not authorised by a reputable Beth Din, their Geirus WILL NOT be accepted in other communities and they will find problems with registering their children in schools and a Rav to be their “mesader Kiddushin”.
YWN: this article is misleading. In Israel, municipal rabbis the are part of the Rabbanut. The proposed change is that today giyur is handled by a specific part / beit din of the Rabbanut and the proposal is to allow other parts of the Rabbanut (municipal rabbis) to handle giyur as well.
Hareidim have never held that government authorized conversions were inherently valid. Also, in most countries where frum Jews live, no government agency approves or disapproves of conversions, and is accepted that conversion is a matter of communal self-governance determined by our rabbanim (that is to say, Lapid and Lieberman and Bennett have no more “say” on giur than Trump or Biden or Putin any other secular leaders). All this means is that in Eretz Yisrael, the religious zionists (who had previously held that the secular sovereign can determine halacha) will now be coerced into the traditional Jewish method of communal governance whereby the validity of a conversion is evaluated based on the facts of the Beis Din and the putative convert. So all that Bennett and friends have accomplished into to make religious zionists into hareidim by forcing them to look to rabbanim and not the state for guidance.
Nowhere in the gemara, rishonim, or acharonim, nowhere in the shulchan aruch or in any other authoritative sefer, do we find this assertion that “giyur is a highly complex issue”, or that one needs “a highly experienced Beth Din”. Nowhere is it stated that there is any need to investigate the candidate, let alone to do a “detective job”. You ask questions, you try to determine whether the person is sincere, and you get on with it.
For that matter, it is NOT necessary that the candidate is willing or able to keep all the mitzvos. He must accept the OBLIGATION to do them, but it’s not necessary that he will fulfill that obligation 100%. As Reb Moshe writes explicitly in Igros Moshe, a candidate for gerus is not promising to be a tzadik. He and the beis din both know that he has a yetzer horo, and will do aveiros just like any other frum Jew. Each Yom Kippur he will have what to do teshuva for, just like all of us. So even if he has a specific intention to do a certain aveira, not because he doesn’t believe in it or he doesn’t accept the obligation, but because his yetzer hora for it is too strong, the giyur is 100% kosher and he is 100% a Jew.
The sources, right through, are also clear that once someone has been validly converted, even by a “beis din shel hedyotos” who neglected to inform him of even the most basic halachos, he is a Jew, and we have no right to treat him as a goy. It is an issur de’oraisa. Treating such a ger as a goy is just as bad as eating treif. How much more so one who was converted by a beis din convened by a city rov. To qualify as a city rov in Israel one must be highly expert in halacha; the exam is renowned as very tough and thorough. To claim that such rabbonim are not qualified to do giyur is an insult. The current regime at the rabbanut is purely about power politics.