The Jew Sleuth

Those of you who know me well know that I am inordinately interested in the Who is a Jew question. There were times when my whole life seemed to be an investigation of the question. When I decided not to go to work in the Jewish community following graduation--something that might have been a logical step, given what I had done with myself as an undergraduate--I did so in no small part to get away from having to think about that question.

When I considered the issues as a less-than-disinterested college student, I always understood the question in denominational terms. The Orthodox were on one side of this issue; the rest of the Jewish community was on the other. It seemed self-evident that the question, as it related not only to Israel but to the Diaspora, was one of Orthodoxy--or at least, a definable segment of Orthodoxy--attempting to impose its power on the rest of the community, of inappropriately turning a theological debate into a political one.

Well, that view of things got blown out of the water today when I read a New York Times article about the hoops people sometimes have to go through to prove their Jewishness in Israel. The piece, published in the Times magazine this past weekend, was framed around a woman who could be any Jewish woman in America, encountering problems when she attempted to marry in Israel. The woman was the daughter of staunch Conservative Jews and had been raised in a Conservative congregation in the Midwest. Her mother's marriage had been performed a Conservative rabbi.

A brief bit of context: Israel has no system of civil marriage. To marry in Israel, one must go to the various religious bodies authorized by the State to perform marriage. And for Jews, there is only one such body: the official Orthodox rabbinate, often seen by the non-religious majority in Israel as hidebound, puritanical, and intrusive.

The basic crux of the article was that Israel's system is ill-fitted to dealing with the prevailing state of affairs in America. Well, duh. To those who follow the issue, this will hardly be news. Ninety percent of American Jews are not Orthodox. Fewer and fewer American Jews have a link one generation back to Orthodoxy. And so fewer and fewer have documentation (usually, a mother's or grandmother's Orthodox ketubah, or marriage contract) acceptable to those who determine who can marry in the Jewish State.

Enter an American-born Orthodox rabbi named Seth Faber. Faber has built a career of helping people establish their Jewish bona fides through geneological investigations. This can require even getting photographs of gravesites to show that a mother's mother had a "Jewish name" or the like.

The article indicated that Rabbi Faber's work has been made necessary in part because even within the Orthodox world, debate is starting to swirl around the Who is a Jew issue. Not in any way that would make me or other children of intermarriage have cause for celebration. But it is apparently now commonplace for Israel's Orthodox rabbinate to question the legitimacy of even American Orthodox rabbis to perform kosher conversions.

For those in the Orthodox world who are affected by this, I have a great deal of compassion. Yet it is somehow deeply satisfying to see mainstream Orthodox rabbis like Marc Angel--people who at one time insisted on the absolute necessity of Orthodox standards of Jewishness for the law of return--find themselves on the receiving end of this kind of rejection. We are now starting to see Orthodox voices calling for separation of synagogue and state in Israel, and for the institution of--horrors!--civil marriage.

It has always been hard for me to understand how some people can find holiness--and almost glee--in keeping others out of the Jewish people. This is not to say that I don't think the people Israel has boundaries, only that policing its boundaries is not its purpose. It was intriguing to find out from this article that even the Chazon Ish, one of the leading Orthodox poskim (decisors of Jewish law) in the middle of the twentieth century, did not take the exclusionary tack the Orthodox world has been taking for the past thirty years. He felt that those who showed up in Israel and claimed to be Jews were to be believed, even if nothing was known of their family of origin.

I find it appalling that someone should have to set himself up as a "Jew sleuth" to determine the bona fides of people wishing to married by the official rabbinate. There are so many more important things for rabbis of all stripes to be concerning themselves with--so many Jewish poor to be helped, so many mourners in Israel to be comforted, so many Jewish youth in need of education. If Moshiach comes, I predict it will be only on the day when a Jew sleuth ceases to be necessary.