Israel’s High Court of Justice has just ruled that a haredi-controlled state rabbinical court can retroactively annul conversions if the convert in question is believed to have deceived the court with regard to his or her commitment to keep halakha (Orthodox Jewish law).
Updated at 2:48 pm CST
Israel's High Court Allows State Haredi-Controlled Rabbinical Court To Annul Conversion, Ruling Could Spark New Conversion Crisis
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Israel’s High Court of Justice has just ruled that a haredi-controlled state rabbinical court can retroactively annul conversions if the convert in question is believed to have deceived the court with regard to his or her commitment to keep halakha (Orthodox Jewish law).
According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, the ruling could “re-open the wounds of the conversion crisis in 2008 when the Supreme Rabbinical Court upheld a decision of a lower court that invalidated a woman’s conversion because it said she never intended to observe Jewish law when she converted. The ruling endangered the 40,000 conversions conducted under the state-conversion system.”
The three-judge panel that issued the ruling said that the convert had “changed her lifestyle dramatically” shortly after completing the conversion process, and nothing was left of her observance of halakha.
However, the court also noted that "our ruling is only regarding a conversion that was obtained deceitfully. One cannot take from our ruling that the rabbinical court for conversion has the authority annul conversions in other cases."
The rabbinical court annulled the conversion two-years after performing it.
But the problem is determining what is in fact deceitful. If a convert sincerely agrees to observe halakha and then sometime later changes her mind, is that “deceitful”?
Normative halakha says it is not. Instead, it holds the conversion is valid and the convert is still Jewish and is like any other Jew who sins.
But over the past few years haredim have sought to change what has been normative Jewish law for at least 900 years. They have repeatedly tried to void conversions of women who wore pants after their conversion or who did not cover their hair or who chose to send children to moderate Orthodox schools rather than haredi schools, and the rabbinical court in question has been part of that movement.
However this particular case – involving a Christian who immigrated from Romania – seems to be a case that dances right on the line between a truly fraudulent conversion and a convert who sins like other Jews sin.
Reform Rabbi Uri Regev, the head of Hiddush, the freedom of and from religion advocacy nonprofit group, went further. He agued that most conversions of people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are fraudulent with regard to the convert’s promise to keep Jewish law, and said that’s okay.
“[It requires] extreme detachment from reality not to know that the majority of converts from the immigrant community from the Former Soviet Union do this [convert] without true intent to accept Torah and commandments upon themselves and are forced to promise false promises that they will observe the religious commandments,” Regev said, adding that because of today’s High Court ruling, rabbis who serve on official state conversion courts “who are working under heavy pressure from the haredim will be able to retroactively annul conversions with the blessing of the High Court of Justice.” Regev opposes annulling these conversions.
Modern Orthodox Rabbi Seth Farber, the director of ITIM, a nonprofit which helps secular Israelis and converts negotiate Israel’s byzantine and often oppressive state religious services system all Israeli Jews are mandated to interact with during lifecycle events like marriages, said today’s ruling, while a setback, would not affect many people.
“The decision associates the conversion courts with the civil courts, a comparison that is specious at best. The major flaw in the decision is that it says that someone’s behavior following a conversion is grounds for determining ones sincerity, but it does not give a timeline for evaluating behavior. In theory, a court could undermine a conversion years later. This is against normative practice in Jewish law and Jewish tradition. Itim will work in the coming Knesset to make sure that converts rights are fully protected,” Farber said.
The High Court approached the case as if the rabbincal court were somehow equivalent to a secular court, and as if halakha played no role in the rabbinical court's ruling.
“Just as the civil court has the inalienable authority to reverse — in extremely rare cases — a final judgment, so too does the special religious conversion court. For otherwise, we would allow for judgments that are flawed from their inception to exist eternally,” Judge Neal Hendel said in the ruling.