“It’s not that we feel unwelcome in Israel,” said Rabbi Schnofeld. “We are unwelcome. Our advocacy for Israel is welcome in the political sphere, but we as Jews and as human beings are unwelcome in the state of Israel.”
Above: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants your money and your political support, but not your rabbis or your religion
The Daily Beast reports:
…The political alienation felt by Jewish Americans is exacerbated by religious alienation, with egregious incidents capturing outraged headlines in the English-language Israeli and Jewish press. In April, for example, a Jewish American immigrant to Israel was assaulted at the Western Wall in Jerusalem after he passed a Torah scroll to a group of women on the other side of the partition that separates the genders.
Rabbi Julie Schonfield, the executive director of the New York-based [Rabbinical] Assembly [of Conservative rabbis], pointed out in a conversation with The Daily Beast that police detained the man who passed the Torah to the women, but did not arrest the man who assaulted him.
“Israel,” said Schonfeld, “is one of the only places on the planet where Jews cannot worship freely.” She continued, “This is wrong. It is not right that a person who holds these hateful views [as expressed by Minister [of Religious Affairs David] Azoulay {of the Sefardi haredi Shas Party}] be the minister of religion for the state that is supposed to represent all Jews.”
Schonfeld later called back to stress that her frustration came out of a sense of deep insult. “Conservative rabbis”, she said emphatically, “Are among Israel’s most loyal and consistent advocates.” She added that 250 Conservative rabbis attended the recent annual AIPAC conference.
Reform and Conservative Jews have been struggling for decades to gain official acceptance from the Rabbinate, meaning that the state would recognize conversions conferred abroad by non-Orthodox rabbis, and sanction their performing weddings and other religious rites of passage in Israel. But until recently the debate was limited to the religious sphere. Now the religious rift has become political. Israel has no civil marriage or divorce.
For Jewish Americans, Netanyahu’s alignment with the religious Right and his indifference to their struggle for legitimacy in Israel were bad enough. But his race-baiting of Arab citizens of Israel during the recent national election, and his overt hostility toward President Obama, who won nearly around 70 percent of the Jewish vote, have proved a sort of tipping point. Jewish Americans are offended by the Netanyahu government twice over — for disrespecting their religious practices and for expressing political opinions that are anathema to their core values.
In Israel, non-observant Jews tend to be indifferent to the Rabbinate, filtering it out of their lives as much as possible. Couples that do not want their marriage performed by a rabbi fly abroad, often to nearby destinations like Cyprus, for a civil ceremony and then register their partnership with the Ministry of the Interior. In recent years it has become increasingly common, particularly in secular, liberal Tel Aviv, for couples to set up a household and have children without bothering to get married at all. Most secular Israelis have never entered a synagogue in their lives.
But for their liberal Jewish peers abroad, involvement in Reform and Conservative synagogues is often more an expression of communal identity than of religious belief. Secular Israeli Jews are sympathetic in theory, but they do not identify with their struggle for acceptance by the religious authorities and the government in Israel. The struggle of secular Israelis is not to liberalize the Rabbinate, but to separate religion and state completely. This, too, is contributing to the rift between Israel and Jewish Americans.
“It’s not that we feel unwelcome in Israel,” said Rabbi Schnofeld. “We are unwelcome. Our advocacy for Israel is welcome in the political sphere, but we as Jews and as human beings are unwelcome in the state of Israel.”…