Liberman urges new government to ease conversion process

Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government Saturday not to repeal marriage reform legislation passed by the previous Knesset, and urged lawmakers to ease the conversion process for thousands of Israelis who are not considered Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate.

Passed in 2013, the Tzohar Law allows Israeli Jews to register their marriage outside the city or town in which they live, and choose their rabbi or marriage registrar. The law was intended to ease the heavily bureaucratic marriage registration process, during which stringent Orthodox rabbis often require couples to produce extensive documentation proving their union is permissible under Jewish law.

The issue of marriage registration largely affects some 400,000 Israelis — many of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union — who qualified for citizenship under the Law of Return but were not Jewish by maternal descent as defined in Orthodox interpretations of Jewish law.

Since only Orthodox Jewish marriage is permitted in Israel, some immigrants and their children must convert if they wish to be legally married in Israel.

The recent coalition agreement reached between the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party and Netanyahu’s Likud, will allow for the repeal of a number of religious reforms, including the Tzohar Law.

“Tonight we celebrate Shavuot, which is falls shortly after the establishment of a new government that intends to repeal the Tzohar Law we enacted in the previous Knesset,” Liberman said in a post on Facebook. “The government is making it harder for those who come here under the Law of Return and wish to convert.”

Evoking the biblical story of Ruth, Liberman urged the prime minister and coalition members to “come to their senses and remember how the Jewish people came to accept those wished to convert.”

Liberman said that repealing marriage reform legislation would “harm citizens who live in Israel, are Jewish in every way and wish to be a part of our nation according to the Halacha but don’t want to be subjected to abuse from a broken and disconnected establishment.”

According to a recent report by the Israeli Democracy Institute, in the last two decades, there has been a drastic reduction in successful conversions through state religious institutions.

The report details that since 1995, there have been over 80,000 conversions to Judaism in Israel, but the average number of converts per year has declined to just 1,800 since the year 2000.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.