Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu previously removed those administrative changes from the cabinet’s schedule in order to appease haredi political parties with whom he hopes to form a new coalition government after the next election, and use their numbers to push out Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party and the right-wing Zionist Orthodox HaBayit HaYehudi Party – who are in many way’s the rivals of both Netanyahu personally and his Likud Party – from the coalition.
Above: MK Elazar Stern
Conversion Reform Bill Passes Knesset Committee
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
The Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee passed the conversion-to-Judaism reform bill sponsored by MK Elazar Stern of the Hatnuah Party in a 6 to 5 vote held earlier today. The bill – which allows local state-employed Orthodox rabbis of towns, rural regions and municipalities to set up their own conversion courts so potential converts are not confined to the four conversion courts appointed and run by the country’s haredi chief rabbis – will now be brought to the full Knesset for its second and third readings. If it passes those, it will become law.
The committee had already approved the bill once before, and then in March it had vote again on the addition of 38 amendments proposed by the opposition. All were voted down.
The bill then passed one reading in the Knesset this summer.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suddenly decided that the governing coalition, of which Stern’s Hatnuah Party is a member, would adopt the changes proposed in Stern’s bill, which are administrative, through a cabinet vote, and the bill’s original second and third Knesset readings were cancelled.
Then last week, Netanyahu removed those administrative changes from the cabinet’s schedule in order to appease haredi political parties with whom he hopes to form a new coalition government after the next election and use their numbers to push out Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party and the right-wing Zionist Orthodox HaBayit HaYehudi Party – who are in many way’s the rivals of both Netanyahu personally and his Likud Party – from the coalition.
Likud now officially opposes conversion reform, although many of its MKs (and most of its members and voters) support it.
HaBayit HaYehudi opposes it because many right-wing Zionist Orthodox and haredi-lite rabbis oppose it.
Moderate Zionist Orthodox and Modern Orthodox rabbis, and the vast majority of Israel’s Jewish population, supports conversion reform.
“We are pleased that, in the end, the lawmakers were able to see beyond the politics and reach out to potential converts in a positive way,” Modern Orthodox Rabbi Seth Farber, director of the ITIM Jewish Advocacy Center, who helped draft the bill, reportedly told the JTA. “Each day, hundreds of individuals who made aliyah as Jews but aren’t recognized as Jews by the Rabbinate are being alienated by the Jewish state. This bill provides them a small glimmer of light.”
The bill’s second and third readings are not yet on the Knesset’s schedule.