From LiLo to LeahLo?
By Eleanor Goldberg
You might think Lindsay Lohan’s Monday morning Facebook status update would make light of some raucous weekend parties. Instead, it’s where the freckled star announced that she intends to convert to Judaism.
After attending the Saturday bar mitzvah of girlfriend Samantha Ronson’s half-brother Saturday, the 22-year-old star of “Mean Girls” and “Herbie Fully Loaded” told an onlooker there that she is “trying” to convert. Following the service, which took place at the Westminster Synagogue in London, Lohan joined the Ronson mishpaha for a bar mitzvah brunch at the Mandarin Oriental at Knightsbridge.
The Long Island-reared Lohan was raised Catholic. Her estranged father is a born-again Christian.
June 3, 2008, 7:46pm
The Jewish Press Leans (a Little Bit) Left for a Change
By Daniel Treiman
The Jewish Press, the nationally distributed, Brooklyn-based Orthodox weekly, can be counted on to lean pretty far to the right when it comes to both politics and religion. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised by a pair of remarkably progressive (by contemporary Orthodox standards) opinion articles on two hot-button religious controversies that were published last week by The Jewish Press.
May 2, 2008, 5:47pm
Poof, You’re Not Jewish Anymore
By Daniel Treiman
Jewschool’s Josh Frankel is up in arms — and with good reason:
Just when you thought the conversion mess couldn’t get any worse - the good folk in Israel drop another bomb. The Jerusalem Post reports that the High Rabbinical Court has ruled to invalidate, retroactively, all of the conversions performed by Rabbi Chaim Druckman since 1999.
Get this straight, Rabbi Chaim Druckman isn’t a reform, conservative, or heck even some strange liberal YCT guy. Rabbi Chaim Druckman is a major Rosh Yeshiva, a recognized halakhic scholar, and at times has been in charge of the national religious education system in Israel. His only offense apparently - he wears a knitted yarmulke.
This isn’t a little thing. Rabbi Druckman isn’t just a private rabbi in a little synagogue. He was the head of the official, government conversion authority. This means that thousands of people’s conversions have been effectively invalidated. Also, this isn’t just a question of whether your local synagogue will let you enroll your kids in day school. This means that thousands of people are no longer Jewish, their kids are no longer Jewish, they are no longer married, they can not get married, they can no longer be buried in ordinary cemetaries, and can no longer go to religious schools. They have been placed as second class citizens. All apparently because one woman, more than fifteen years after she converted was no longer shomeret shabbat - according to the ideals of this rabbinic court.
Here’s The Jerusalem Post’s article on the ruling.
UPDATE: Writing in Ha’aretz in response to this ruling, Asher Maoz opens fire. Meanwhile, The Jerusalem Post reports, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Shlomo Amar, is trying to reassure converts, and the Knesset is planning to take up the issue.
UPDATE II: The Rabbinical Council of America is lending its voice to the chorus of critics of the rabbinic court’s opinion, JTA reports.
February 1, 2008, 2:17pm
How Anthony Lake Became a Jew — First in Others' Eyes, Then Officially
By Daniel Treiman
Speaking before an audience at New York University’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life — where he was boosting the presidential bid of Barack Obama — former Clinton administration national security adviser Anthony Lake related the amusing story of how he was often mistaken for a Jew, sometimes allowed others to think he was a Jew and, finally, actually became a Jew. As far as I can tell from this brief sound clip posted by the JTA, he did it for the food, the jokes and the arguments.
January 5, 2008, 9:18pm
Israeli Rightist: Conversion Is Existential Issue
By Daniel Treiman
The debate over conversion has been heating up, here in America and in Israel. Last week, the left-wing Israeli daily Ha’aretz weighed in with a searing editorial urging the rabbinate to stop obstructing the conversion of the masses of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not considered Jewish under halacha. This week, it’s a right-wing Knesset member who’s pushing to make conversion easier.
Ha’aretz reports that Yisreal Beiteinu Knesset member David Rotem is submitting a bill that would expand the numbers of rabbis able to conduct conversions:
Rotem says the Chief Rabbinate once permitted all municipal rabbis to conduct conversions, but it withdrew that authority. Rotem wants to restore it and to expand it to rabbis in moshavim and kibbutzim.
The Yisrael Beitenu MK argues that, “If we do not resolve the conversion problem, the Jewish state is done for. The nation of Israel will be divided into two and they will start keeping books of yuhasin [family trees]. I want to preserve the unity of the nation of Israel.”
Ha’aretz reports, however, that without the support of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, Rotem’s bill “will be shelved.”
January 3, 2008, 4:07pm
Who’s Your Messiah?
By Daniel Treiman
“If you believe that a dead man is the messiah, does that disqualify you from converting to Judaism?”That’s the question raised in a Jerusalem Post article about an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who came to Israel under its Law of Return and was interested in converting to Judaism. While the rabbis were impressed with his religious observance, the problem came when they started asking him questions prompted by his affiliation with the Chabad Hasidic sect, which tends toward the belief that its late rebbe is the messiah.
The Post reports:
December 29, 2007, 11:06pm
The Rabbis Said Choose: You Can Be an Olympian or a Jew — But Not Both
By Daniel Treiman
Benjamin Ish-Shalom, head of Israel’s Joint Conversion Institute, recently gave an interview to The Jewish Week that should makes one’s blood boil.
Ish-Shalom’s institute is the product of a collaboration between different streams of Judaism that has worked to help facilitate the conversion of the large numbers of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not considered to be Jews under halacha because their mothers aren’t Jewish.
Unfortunately, even though the Joint Conversion Institute has backing from Orthodox rabbis, its students have had a hard time passing muster with the official Orthodox rabbinic courts. The courts’ obstructionism has been so great that Ish-Shalom (who is himself Orthodox) is threatening to set up independent conversion courts. Ish-Shalom says that the existing courts often make demands on converts that have no basis in Jewish law.
Here’s a particularly maddening bit from Ish-Shalom about the behavior of the rabbinic courts:
December 27, 2007, 6:08pm
Ha’aretz: Stop Blocking Conversion of FSU Immigrants
By Daniel Treiman
An impassioned editorial in Ha’aretz rails against the Orthodox rabbinate for erecting barriers to the conversion of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who were brought to Israel under the Law of Return:
Bitter infighting, saturated with political power plays, deal-making of the lowest form, and strong-arm tactics driven by personal animosity have brought division to the national religious camp. In matters of conversion, just like in matters of matrimony, liberals in that camp side with the view that as many immigrants as possible must be helped to attain that desirable entry ticket into Israeli society with relative ease. On the other hand, all roads to conversion are blocked by pedants and purists, who succumb to ultra-Orthodox rabbis on all issues. They transform conversion into an ongoing nightmare, which may repel the new immigrants from the entire process and alienate them from Israeli society and Judaism.
Conversions are being carried out by the most stringent guardians of the halakha, who are essentially a minority group among world Jewry. They pose halakhic requirements for the converts and their families that are very strict. At the gate to the national home established by Zionists now stand representatives of the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodoxy.
What’s noteworthy here is that a liberal Israeli daily wants so badly for immigrants to have access to Orthodox-recognized conversion. If the Orthodox establishment, however, continues its intransigence, don’t be surprised when Israeli liberals simply throw up their hands and cease to care about conversion. Instead, secular and liberal Israelis will simply become resigned to the idea that Israeli Jewry is divided into two peoples. If this comes to pass, the Orthodox establishment will deserve much of the blame.
Indeed, there is also an implicit threat within the editorial: “[for] those who do not wish to convert and those who are unable to do so — the government must find an appropriate solution outside the parameters dictated by religion.”
The editorial concludes on the following note:
The State of Israel encouraged and brought to the country hundreds of thousands of immigrants on the basis of their connection to the Jewish people. It thus has a historic and Jewish responsibility to complete the process of fully accepting them into Israeli society.
Read the full article.
December 18, 2007, 3:16pm
Adlerstein vs. Angel on Conversion
By Daniel Treiman
Last month, Rabbi Marc Angel, rabbi emeritus of New York’s historic Congregation Shearith Israel, penned an impassioned critique of the adoption of new — and, he argued, needlessly restrictive — conversion policies by the Rabbinical Council of America, an organization he once served as its president.
The article generated plenty of discussion in the Orthodox world (including a response from several other past presidents of the RCA in a letter to the Forward). While the RCA is the main body for Centrist and Modern Orthdox rabbis, Angel’s article has also generated discussion in more religiously right-leaning precincts.
Indeed, the debate has now migrated from the pages of the Forward to a new venue: the blog Cross-Currents, a lively forum on Jewish issues whose contributors include a number of prominent Haredi thinkers. One Cross-Currents blogger, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of Los Angeles, penned a lengthy reply to Angel’s Forward article. Now, Angel has responded on Cross-Currents, and Adlerstein has weighed in again.
The debate is a bit esoteric for the general reader, but its contours are nevertheless quite interesting.
While I’m definitely no halachic expert (I’m actually a halachic ignoramus), I’ll nevertheless toss in my two cents:
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