Knesset newcomer party Yesh
Atid, with its eclectic slate of MKs from across the religious spectrum, set
the ball rolling on Tuesday on what party members hope will be a weekly Knesset
event: Torah study.

Party MKs Rabbi Shai Piron
and Dr. Ruth Calderon invited parliamentarians and their staffs to the session,
and were pleased to find more than 30 people, including 12 of Yesh Atid’s 19
faction members, gathered for the Knesset’s first ever “beit midrash”.

“MK Calderon stood on
the speakers’ platform... and then the realization suddenly hit us; we are
seeing in a live broadcast the new enlightenment, the new forces that have
arisen and want to annihilate haredi society in its current form,” the website
wrote in an editorial.

“Haredi society finds
itself facing a much more complex threat [than the Enlightenment of the 18th and
19th centuries], against the demand from us to integrate into the secular
Jewish society,” the article continued.

Israeli
society has been trained to associate traditional Jewish sources with the
ultra-Orthodox community, whose entire belief that only elite orthodox men can
truly understand Talmud is at the heart of some of the most heated debates
about social and economic issues in Israel. Suddenly, we had a secular feminist
breaking all of the molds and expectations by owning the text.

I found the whole event disturbing
and pretentious, false and flat. Imagine the next time Calderon ascends the
dais to make a political point. Which ancient tractate will she expect the
assembled legislators to learn from then? And imagine if a haredi
politician tried to pull this kind of stunt at the Knesset, or if a
Congressperson or Senator sought to do the same with the New Testament at the
U.S. Capitol. All hell would have broken out, rightly. Calderon somehow got
away with it, which is too bad.

Yair Lapid understands that Judaism’s religious
elements cannot be disentangled from national and cultural elements and
acknowledges that earlier attempts to marginalize religion failed. Instead of
struggling against religion, he has adopted a strategy of embracing Judaism
while insisting that no particular manifestation or interpretation of it is
privileged over any other. With Orthodox Jews comprising nearly a third
of the incoming Knesset and a growing percentage of Israel's total population,
Lapid apparently fears the closing of the window of opportunity to alter the
arrangement that forms the basis of Israel’s religious politics. His
father tried with a head-on approach and failed; can the son's more pliant
strategy succeed?

Yair Lapid understands that Judaism’s religious
elements cannot be disentangled from national and cultural elements and
acknowledges that earlier attempts to marginalize religion failed. Instead of
struggling against religion, he has adopted a strategy of embracing Judaism
while insisting that no particular manifestation or interpretation of it is
privileged over any other. With Orthodox Jews comprising nearly a third of the
incoming Knesset and a growing percentage of Israel's total population, Lapid
apparently fears the closing of the window of opportunity to alter the
arrangement that forms the basis of Israel’s religious politics. His father
tried with a head-on approach and failed; can the son's more pliant strategy
succeed?

The only
way to escape this intolerable situation is by separating religion and state,
as is the case in many countries around the world. This will happen only when
political parties and private citizens begin to demand it. The sooner the
process begins the better it will be for Israel and for many Israelis – even
those who are unaware of this issue's profound significance.

Over the
years, as the Charedi community has exploded, it has infiltrated and taken over
the moderate rabbinate and has made increasingly hard-line demands on the rest
of Israeli society. The scandalous state of conversions in Israel amply highlights
this trend. If their uncompromising mentality becomes enshrined in Israeli law,
it will lead to a paralysis of inter-human legislation and will only damage
Israeli civil society.

Sadly,
because the Chief Rabbinate’s power grabs continue to dominate the image of
religion in Israel, innovative movements that might improve this image — such
as the spiritual revival among Israeli youth (visible in desert festivals) and
the movement to study Talmud in the secular world — have gotten too little
attention.

That’s a
shame. This vibrant grass-roots religious scene in Israel ought to be of great
interest to Jewish communities of the Diaspora.

By the
same token, the pluralism and tolerance that we take for granted in America and
that Israeli groups like Hiddush actively promote, are overdue for exporting to
Israel.

The ITIM religious
services and advocacy group has filed a petition with the High Court of Justice
demanding that the Interior Ministry recognize Orthodox conversions performed
in Israel in non-state Orthodox rabbinical courts.

ITIM’s petition argues
that the ministry has exceeded its authority by essentially monopolizing the
ability to determine who is a Jew, and demands that it make public its criteria
for establishing this.

The organization also
requested in its suit that the court issue an injunction against the Interior
Ministry, to compel it to recognize the conversion of the two women, who are
party to its suit, together with two further cases.

ITIM director Orthodox
Rabbi Seth Farber said that the petition was “a good opportunity to open doors
of conversion to more people who are looking for alternative Orthodox
conversion routes.”

Several
hundred mixed-race Peruvian converts, also known as the “Jews of the Amazon,”
are not being granted permission to immigrate to Israel under the Law of
Return, despite meeting all the requirements for eligibility, Jewish Agency and
Conservative Movement leaders charge.

Yizhar
Hess, the director of the Conservative movement in Israel, who participated in
this morning’s session, told Haaretz: “Hundreds of Jews are waiting today in
Peru to immigrate to Israel, and their only sin is that they are Conservative.”

Rabbi
Andrew Sacks, director of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly in
Israel, told Haaretz that based on his experience with converts, “when they are
people of color, they are guaranteed to run into a roadblock and obfuscation in
their attempts to make aliyah.”

When religion slips
into power politics, it is religion itself that becomes sullied. It is not
surprising that a high percentage of the Israeli population has little respect
for the Rabbanut. It is not surprising that a very high percentage of Jews in
the Diaspora view the Rabbanut negatively. As symbols of religion, the Rabbanut
and its allies have been remarkable failures. Instead of inspiring respect and
admiration for Judaism and halakha, the “religious establishment” has generated
disdain for—even hatred of—Judaism and halakha. The further it slips away from
the spiritual and compassionate ideals of religion, the further it removes
itself from the goodwill of the Jewish world.

The Conversion question stands at the center of a
much broader debate, comprehending many different, if related topics. Discussion of the question of 'Who is a Jew?', for obvious reasons, tends to
quickly become very personal, and very nasty. This is certainly understandable.
It is also unhelpful. If we are to address the question, we need to restrain
our passions and speak with our heads, as much as with our hearts. We also need
to be better informed voters and citizens.

[T]he time has come to
stop ignoring the elephant in the room. It is time to call for those who make
decisions as to which converts to Judaism may make Aliyah based on issues other
than the facts, and the demands of the law, to either change their ways or be
fired. As one who recognizes that firing is not really an option in the
bureaucracy of the government I would accept that those involved be pushed
upstairs, aside, out, or to some nihilarian division.

Yaakov
dreams of becoming the first rabbi to lead the Kaifeng Jewish community, a
small Jewish community in China's Henan province, in more than 200 years. This
week, he got one step closer to that goal. After immersing himself in the Hod
Hasharon town mikveh, a ritual bath, and affirming his acceptance of the
mitzvot, he was officially pronounced a Jew.

Transport Ministry
Director General Uzi Yitzhaki ordered disciplinary measures against the Egged
bus company, after one of its drivers did not stop an attack on a student who
got on a bus last weekend and was verbally harassed by haredi passengers.

"Everyone who got
on the bus told me to move to the back, they said I was impure and yelled that
everyone should say the Traveler's Prayer very loudly because there's an
impurity in the bus."

"On a break in
Megido Junction I got off to talk to the police officers. When I got back on I
saw on my seat a note which said: 'We're all kosher Jews, please help us keep
kosher and move to the back, where the women sit."

“It’s time the law
defined the segregation of women as a crime,” newly elected MK Yael German
(Yesh Atid) said in a statement Sunday. “The segregation of women is a
phenomenon endangering the future of Israeli society. It is the state’s
responsibility to stop this phenomenon from growing,” she wrote.

A few days later, Rinat Am Shalom, an
ultra-Orthodox young woman with a baby, boarded the same bus line from Tzfat to
Ashdod and sat in the fourth row of the bus. She experienced similar yelling
and threats from many of the ultra-Orthodox male passengers. Despite the
continued harassment, Am Shalom did not move to the back of the bus, where the
rest of the women were sitting.

The High
Court of Justice has given the Education Ministry 100 days to prepare a plan
for including the Haredi schools in the Meitzav standardized achievement test,
which all public schools in Israel must administer. The test is given to
elementary and middle school students around the country.

The
hearing took place in the presence of Supreme Court President Justice Asher
Grunis. He discussed the petition from the Reform Movement, which asked that
the High Court of Justice instruct the ministry to have the schools administer
the tests and revoke the budget of any school that refused.

If not for
the Reform Movement’s petition to the High Court, it is doubtful whether the
Education Ministry would have done anything to change the situation. In
previous rounds of court hearings the ministry would pull out its card of
“dialogue” with Haredi leaders and warned against judicial intervention, and
promised that real change was just around the corner. Those promises were
baseless. Based on their remarks Thursday, it seems the justices were also
tired of hearing the Education Ministry’s evasive excuses.

Following the court's decision,
the Ministry of Education has been charged with the task of developing a plan
within 100 days to implement the standardized tests. Rabbi Regev concluded
that, "the ultra-Orthodox leadership must be presented with a clear
choice: If they are determined to continue to provide partial education to
their students, it's going to come from their own pockets and not from the
piggy bank of the rest of Israeli tax-payers."

The government says Gold has not
fulfilled the criteria set by the state for non-Orthodox rabbis. Gold and her
allies say the criteria are onerous and unfairly set different conditions for
Orthodox and non-Orthodox rabbis.

In a bid to challenge the rules,
Gold, another non-Orthodox Israeli rabbi, and the Conservative and Reform
movements filed a new court petition last week.

Two months ago, the Ministry of
Culture and Sport released its new criteria for non-Orthodox rabbis to collect
state salaries. To be eligible, the rabbis must work full-time and be present
at their congregation for at least 40 Sabbaths per year. Only rabbis of
congregations with at least 250 members can receive full-time pay; those
leading congregations of 50-250 members may receive half a salary even though
they’d be required to work full-time.

By contrast, Orthodox rabbis do
not need to work a certain number of hours, and there is no minimum size
requirement for their congregations to qualify for salaries.

Rehovot
residents have won their struggle against a planned ritual bath in the heart of
one of its secular neighborhoods, with the Supreme Court quashing an appeal
from the city's religious council and closing the matter for good.

The court
sided with the residents. “It seems that there was no sufficiently in-depth
demographic survey of the residents and their needs,” the ruling read.

The Knesset held a
special session on Wednesday morning to discuss the issue of agunot, or
“chained women” whose husbands refuse to give them a bill of divorce, thereby
preventing them from getting remarried.

The conference was an
initiative of Yesh Atid MK Aliza Lavie and the International Coalition for
Aguna Rights, ahead of International Aguna Day, which takes place as it does
every year on the Fast of Esther, which is marked this year on Thursday.

How many more years
is Jewish society going to mark Agunah Day on Taaanit Esther (the day of
fasting, which falls on Feb 21st this year)? When will all the sectors of Orthodoxy
agree that settling each case piecemeal (i.e. paying off the husbands that
actually deign to talk to the rabbis or having the rabbinical hands tied in the
cases where the husband simply refuses or has disappeared) is not acceptable to
society as a whole? How long are we all going to wait for a systematic rabbinic
solution to the agunah problem?

[W]hat Dr. Goldfine
has taught us is that the entire Jewish community needs protection from the
blight that rips away at our social fabric—get-refusal and iggun.
There are halakhic solutions available to the agunah problem, which when
consensually agreed upon will afford that protection. But it takes every member
of that community to put that protection in place – for the community’s own
sake.

The agunah problem is
multi-faceted – involving rabbis, the civil family court, the rabbinical court,
government ministries and committees, societal mores, individuals and the
legislature. It can be solved by each of the aforementioned components first
recognizing the problem and then cooperating in a coalition to bring about
solutions.

Now is the time for
each of the contenders to the formation of the next government of Israel to
take the lead and to relate to the very core of the status of women in a
Jewish-democratic state.

Supreme
Court President Asher Grunis has overruled the High Court of Justice and given
the Rabbinical Appeals Court the power to decide the fate of a man jailed for
refusing for 10 years to grant his wife a divorce. Grunis’ decision was blasted
by womens’ groups as grossly unjust.

“The
Rabbinical Court ruling, now backed by the High Court, is a slippery slope,”
said attorney Batia Kahana-Dror of Mavoi Satum.

The Central Bureau of
Statistics figures showed that 9,262 marriages that took place abroad were
reported to the Interior Ministry in 2010.

Some 1,533 of those
marriages were of couples in which both spouses were Jewish. 797 of those
couples, totaling 52 percent of the marriages, were conducted in Cyprus or the
Czech Republic, representing 2.2% of the total number of Jewish marriages
conducted in 2010.

The remainder of the
1,533 Jewish couples that got married abroad in 2010 wed in the US, Canada,
France, the states of the former Soviet Union, the UK and Australia.

The ministry says that
Jewish couples marrying in these countries marry in Jewish, rather than civil,
ceremonies.

Among couples in which
one of the partners is Jewish and the other is not included in the census
registration, about half were married in the US and in a former Soviet country
(31% and 18%, respectively) and others were married in the United Kingdom and
Australia (3-4%).

In Israel,
where there is no separation between religion and state, the Orthodox conversion
law maintains that a child born to a non-Jewish surrogate mother – as most of
the North American surrogates, and certainly all those in India and elsewhere
in Asia would be – needs to be converted to be considered Jewish. This is the
case even if the sperm donor is Jewish, and even if both the sperm and egg
donor are both Jews. The law pertains to all couples in Israel – heterosexual
and homosexual – wishing to register their children born with the help of
non-Jewish surrogates.But while such a conversion would be little more
than a formality when it comes to the babies of Jewish heterosexual couples,
there is a problem when it comes to the gay community. The conversion board,
which, according to halakha, or Jewish law, does not accept homosexual couples,
cannot and will not convert babies whom they know will be brought up in a gay
household.

"Instead
of taking the responsibility [for that power] and behaving with statesmanship,
resolving all the problems using solutions that exist in halakha, they are
doing the opposite, flexing their muscle and stressing who has the power,"
Michaeli said at a Knesset debate on agunot, or women whose husbands
refuse to grant them a divorce.Michaeli added that she hoped the present
Knesset would have the spine to abolish the rabbis' exclusive powers over
"how we live our lives… divorce, marriage and personal status."

Until such
time, she said, the only solution is not to marry in Israel. "Make
agreements and ceremonies, but don't register as married," she urged
women.

On the day
we support civil marriages, we will effectively be saying that we have
despaired of the state’s Jewishness. That the Zionist dream is over, that the
vision of Rabbi [Zvi Yehuda] Kook has faded. Many people tell us, “Thanks to
Tzohar, people are still getting married through the Rabbinate. If it weren’t
for you, we could just as well shut down the Rabbinate.” That is true. We are
the last barrier before the collapse of the Rabbinate. And we believe in the
importance of that institution, because we believe in the state and we believe
in Judaism.

It is the
state’s role to provide everything that is necessary, at the bureaucratic
level, in order to remove every obstacle. In regard to the halakha, I do not
intend to compromise in any way.

Supporters
of Rabbi Igra have organized their own electoral event on Thursday for the
selection of the candidate who, as they put it, will get the stamp of approval
of the leading religious Zionist rabbis.Dozens of rabbis are expected to
convene tomorrow in Jerusalem, most of whom are identified with the
conservative wing of religious Zionism, but the entire initiative is the work
of backers of one candidate, Igra, who in addition to heading the Be'er Sheva
religious court is currently on temporary assignment on the Supreme Rabbinical
Court.

In June 98 rabbis, 35
mayors and 17 public figures will vote in secret ballot to elect Israel’s next
chief rabbis for a 10-year term. But in truth, the identity of the new chief
rabbis will likely be determined between now and March 17 in the current
negotiations for formation of a new coalition government.

Shas
officials have been working over recent months to have the term of Rishon
L’Tzion HaGaon HaRav Moshe Shlomo Amar extended for an additional 10 years,
permitting him to continue serving as Israel’s Chief Sephardi Rabbi.

[T]here are other
“Women of the Wall” you may not have heard about. Their gathering place
is in a small grotto inside the Kotel Tunnels, opposite the place of kodesh
hakedoshim – the Holy of Holies. Without PR and cameras, they build their
own significant Judaism – the Judaism of sincere prayer and heartfelt emotion.
Theirs is an authentic connection best described by Rav Shimshon Pinkus as
sharing a secret with God.

American Jews do not
want a new compromise that will relegate them to the back of the bus or the
fringes of the holy mountain. American Jews want the struggle over a free and
open Kotel to be the crucible that reignites affiliation and love for Israel,
rather than the grinding sore that pushes Jews away.

Novelist A.B. Yehoshua
created waves once again Sunday evening, telling a group of over 200 American
Jews that if they really want to be Jewish, they should move to Israel, since
Israeli Jews are “total” Jews, while those living in the Diaspora are only
“partial” Jews.

On
Thursday, February the 28th 2013 the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty
organize in cooperation with the Israeli Religion Action Center and the
Interdisciplinary Center in Herzeliya a conference on the topic: “State and
Religion – Israel 2013”

The
conference will take place at the IDC-Campus in Herzeliya and will be held in
Hebrew with translation into English.