Chief Rabbi Declares War on Orthodox Conversion Rebels
Image by Getty Images
Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi accused the founders of a private conversion court of “fighting against the Torah.”
David Lau made the allegation Thursday night at the inaugural event of B’Noam, a lobby group devoted to defending the policies of Israel’s chief rabbinate and its religious establishment, in reference to the announcement last week of several prominent Orthodox rabbis about their launching of the conversion court.
The court’s founders, including Rabbi David Stav of the Tzohar outreach group, cited bureaucracy and overly stringent practices at rabbinate courts when it comes to conversions — especially among approximately 300,000 Russian-speaking Israelis who are not considered Jews according to the Rabbinate.
“The rabbinate, its courts, rabbis and dayanim are recently under a severe attack in the media, by organizations and in public discourse,” Lau said at the event Thursday, according to a report by the news site ynet.co.il. This assault, he said, goes back to the appearance of the Torah, “and the attempts to fight against it and its representatives. For as long as it has existed, the rabbinical leadership has withstood changes that could hurt the Torah, the Halacha, the integrity of the Jewish people and we, too, on our watch, will do all we can.”
Rabbi David Yossef, a senior leader of the Shas Orthodox Sephardic party, said during a different event on Thursday that Stav – to whom he referred by name only without acknowledging his title of rabbi – and his colleagues “are nothing more than Reform Jews with a kippah.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
