Thousands of diaspora converts may not be recognized by the chief rabbinate – Diaspora

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The criteria issued by the chief rabbinate on Tuesday to recognize rabbinical courts for conversion and divorce mean that thousands of Orthodox converts are unlikely to be recognized in Israel.

The organization of ITIM religious services has been battling for six years to force the chief rabbinate to reveal how he determines which orthodox rabbinical courts he agrees to carry out critical procedures relating to personal status, such as the conversion and divorce, and the body finally made these criteria public.

ITIM Director, Seth Farer, strongly criticized these criteria, saying that they were not based on Jewish law but that they had been designed to create a political monopoly on questions about Jewish personal status.

"It's a question of power, institutions and centralization, unprecedented in Jewish history," said the rabbi.

The new criteria stipulate that only permanent rabbinical tribunals "which meet regularly and have three permanent rabbinical judges" will be recognized, although the vast majority of rabbinic courts in the diaspora are ad hoc, non-permanent, and do not correspond. to the criteria of the Chief Rabbinate.

This means that the Chief Rabbinate will not recognize the many converts who have been and still are executed in the United States by ad hoc orthodox rabbinical courts in local communities, which means that many of these converts will not be judged Jewish by Jewish state. will not be eligible to immigrate here and will be unable to get married here too.

In addition, people who have divorced before these courts, among which there is a good chance that thousands of people, are not considered divorced by the chief rabbinate.

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This situation is likely to wreak havoc on converts and divorced Orthodox diaspora and their descendants who are trying to immigrate to Israel.

Divorced children who divorced before an ad hoc rabbinical court and then remarried could very well be considered mamzers, highly problematic status in Jewish law with serious personal repercussions for the people involved.

The new criteria also make it extremely difficult to obtain recognition by the Chief Rabbinate for any new rabbinical court established in the future, and stipulate that no new rabbinical court can be created in a city where there is already a rabbinical court, except in the following cases: rare circumstances.

And if the existing rabbinical courts, which until now have not been recognized by the Chief Rabbinate, seek this recognition, their rabbinical judges will have to visit Israel and be examined by rabbinic judges of the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Israel. .

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