Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 11, 2017

Israels Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau said in a letter that he did not know of the existence of a blacklist of Diaspora rabbis and that it should not have been released to the public.

The chief rabbi was shocked to discover this list, read the letter written by an aide on behalf of Lau and issued Sunday. This was done without the rabbis knowledge or his agreement. How can a list like this be publicized without the rabbi being made aware of the list itself or of its publication?

The results of this are very serious, the letter continued. First of all, an employee in the Chief Rabbinate cannot decide on his own to publicize who the Rabbinate approves or not. Secondly, the damage this does to certain rabbis cannot be exaggerated including to the Chief Rabbinate.

The list consists of 160 rabbis from 24 countries whom the Chief Rabbinate does not trust to confirm the Jewish identities of immigrants. It includes rabbis from the United States and Canada, and Orthodox, Conservative and Reform rabbis. It was released to JTA and other news outlets over the weekend by Itim, a nonprofit that guides Israelis through the countrys religious bureaucracy, after it received the list as part of a freedom-of-information request made in 2015 in a Jerusalem municipal court demanding a list of approved foreign rabbis and received this list as part of that case.

According to a JTA tally of the 66 American rabbis on the list, at least one-fifth are Orthodox, including several prominent Orthodox rabbis and one alumnus of the Baltimore ultra-Orthodox seminary Ner Yisroel. The vast majority of US rabbis on the list are Reform or Conservative.

In Sundays letter, Lau ordered Chief Rabbinate Director-General Moshe Dagan to call in Rabbi Itamar Tubul, who kept and released the list, for questioning and a reprimand.

In December, rabbis at the Chief Rabbinate set up a controversial committee to vet conversions, but it is not clear whether the committee approved the published list.

Earlier Sunday, Lau had dismissed reports of a schism between Israel and US Jews over the Western Wall deal as fake news, claiming that the vast majority of American Jews never set foot in Israel anyway.

Speaking at a conference organized by the ultra-Orthodox daily newspaper Hamodia, Rabbi David Lau said that the biggest issue facing US Jews was not the Western Wall or the conversion bill, but intermarriage and apathy about the Jewish state.

In the past two weeks we have been exposed to lies, that American Jews are tearing themselves away from Israel, said Lau. Eighty-five percent of American Jews have never set foot in Israel.

At the end of June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government backtracked on a January 2016 plan to officially recognize a separate, permanent, pluralistic prayer area at Robinsons Arch, adjacent to the main Western Wall prayer area, in a compromise reached after years of negotiations between liberal Israeli and American Jewish groups and the Israeli authorities. The frozen deal would have given non-Orthodox Jewish leaders a joint role in the oversight of the pluralistic site. Currently, a temporary prayer facility exists there.

Archaeologists claim the egalitarian platform harms the visual story of the Western Wall by hiding important archaeological artifacts. (courtesy, Eilat Mazar)

Under ultra-Orthodox management, the main Western Wall area is separated between mens and womens prayer sections.

Lau rejected claims that the Western Wall was only for ultra-Orthodox Jews.

I was in the US a few months ago, he said. I was asked: Why do you not let people of other faiths come to pray at the Western Wall? I told them that is also false. I was at the Western Wall. Next to me was a man from Nigeria. I dont know how he prayed, who he prayed to. But he stood there. Did I bother him? Did he bother me?

Lau quoted the verse that My house is a place of prayer for all the nations, saying that all were welcome to come and pray. He did not explain how those who want pluralistic prayer could do so, but he said those making a fuss about the mixed gender plaza werent interested in coming to Jerusalem to pray.

A young member of Women of the Wall holds up the miniature Torah scroll during the monthly Rosh Hodesh service on June 25, 2017, in the womens section of the Western Wall plaza, just before Netanyahu froze the Kotel Agreement. (Melanie Lidman/Times of Israel)

Of the 15% of US Jews who have visited Israel, Lau said, many of them are Orthodox, or wanted only separate prayer at the Western Wall. He implied that the actual number who cared about a mixed plaza was insignificant.

In the same meeting at the end of June, the cabinet also advanced a bill that would have granted the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, an ultra-Orthodox-dominated body, sole authority over recognized Jewish conversions within Israel. The conversion bill, however, was shelved on Friday for six months.

Efrats Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin officiates at a conversion examination for the Giyur Kahalacha private conversion court, November 2015. (courtesy)

Lau said this was also fake news and denied that the judges on the rabbinate conversion courts were out of touch with reality.

You should know that most of the judges in rabbinic courts were officers in the IDF, he said. They are connected to the Jewish experience as much as everyone else.

But he said that Israel cannot allow a situation where any three Jews can convene to form a conversion court, and award certificates of conversion. They give a certificate, he said, but what about Judaism.

He stressed that Israel bears a responsibility to care for US and Diaspora Jews, who are our brothers. But the way to do that was not through the Western Wall or conversion, but through education and strengthening their Jewish commitment.

Lau, along with Chief Sephardi Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, was instrumental in pushing ministers to force the government to backtrack on the Western Wall deal. Just a week before the cabinet decision the rabbinate released a letter that condemned the plans to improve the mixed-gender prayer at the Wall.

View of the current mixed-gender prayer section at the Western Wall in Jerusalem Old City on March 6, 2016. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The position of the Chief Rabbinate is that the government decision on dividing the Western Wall is invalid and cannot stand, the letter said, according to a copy obtained by the Israel Hayom daily. The Chief Rabbinate is the highest halachic [Jewish legal] authority in the state, and therefore it is entirely forbidden to hold mixed prayer, men and women together, at any site of the Western Wall.

The governments reneging on the two decisions about the Western Wall and conversions were met with fierce opposition from American-Jewish groups, philanthropists, businessmen and various figures active in the Jewish world, as well as Israeli politicians, who expressed their dismay and disappointment. Some have intimated the decisions might impact financial contributions to Israel and warned of eroding support for the Jewish state.

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Chief Ashkenazi rabbi says he didn't know of 'blacklist' of Diaspora rabbis - The Times of Israel

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